Edmund White Quotes

Paris is a city where even the most outrageous story of incest and murder is greeted with a verbal shrug: ‘Mais c’est normal!’

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well.

In fact, they are the classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.