{"author":"Edmund White","author_id":"Edmund+White","total_quotes":38,"quotes":[{"text":"He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["perfect","sad"],"id":5905,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["thought","fight","people "],"id":15107,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"I'm sorry,' Billy says, 'but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["writing"],"id":22258,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["gay","love","relationship","self-image"],"id":27564,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["books","writing"],"id":39803,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"AIDS had won gays sympathy they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. ","author":"Edmund White","tags":["aids","general","privileged "],"id":44056,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["details","you","line "],"id":72556,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"He was a good boy and ‘projected’ goodness – which later would be the downfall of many a person.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["goodness"],"id":117415,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["gay","negative","pressure "],"id":117943,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island.","author":"Edmund White","tags":["man","men","remember "],"id":126674,"author_id":"Edmund+White"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":38,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}