Edmund WhiteThinkers

Biography is capable of being the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

Biography is a form by which little people take revenge on big people.

Hell is God's absence.

The Imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

Literature is a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance. It is a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

Los Angeles is a place where few human contacts go unmediated by glass (either a tv screen or an automobile windshield), that direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet, into a kind of oriental politeness.

Paris is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.

Pornography is a substitute for sex in adolescence whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity as though life were all flame and no ash.

Same-sex marriage is an important step in gay rights. For if bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them. As such, this seems to amount to evidence that gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.

San Francisco is a city of gay fantasy come true. The problem the city presents is that they unsuited us for the business of daily life, forcing us to question whether our notion of daily life itself must be transformed.