The Unpunished Vice Quotes

“I like to read great books not because I’m hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won’t be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“I remember Ronald Firbank once said, upon entering a bookshop, something like, “Do you have anything in my line, you know, something dreamy and vague?”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Someone said a writer should read three times more than he or she writes.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Many people like books because they’re suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real people. Maybe it’s only writers who like the writing.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“So many novelists of our time eschew any “message,” as if it’s an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“There’s more to contemporary literature than American coffee-cup realism.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“I sometimes wonder if what I consider “romance” might be dying out—l’amour fou, crazy love, destructive passion, crippling jealousy, extreme and violent and tragic.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Later I would know some real workers—heavily tattooed, hair worn in ponytails, motorcycle-riding, manga-reading, and pill-popping—and I realized they were as batty as we were, far from the standardized robots of our fantasies. Americans, rich or poor, were a nation of weirdos.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Precision is easier to master than artful vagueness, especially now when, thanks to Google, novels are fact-heavy. We no longer refer to “flowers” but to particular varieties of roses. The whole valuable distinction between foreground (precise) and background (blurred) has been lost, and now everything is crowding toward the viewer, clamoring for attention.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Teenagers, flooded with destabilizing hormones and a longing for elsewhere, are particularly prone to the seductive power of dark narratives.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Maybe “texts” get worn out. I once debated with Alan Sinfield, a professor in England, who argued that even classics like Shakespeare’s plays lose their appeal or relevance over time. Or maybe he was just saying, as Foucault might have said, that works of literature are “constructed” by cultural materialism and can’t be separated from their political context—just the opposite view from all our “humanists” who think the classics are eternal.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Whoever has not known the pleasures of open stacks—with their erotically charged corridors.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“That’s one of the problems—and joys—of old age: every time you read a book it’s the first.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Other writers, especially the ones you admire, can steer you to good books.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“The novel is alive and thriving through various strategies of renovation. The merging of fiction and reality, of memoir and narrative, is one great current source of strength. The reimagining of the historical novel is a second. And the third is the admission of new voices previously unheard or slienced.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“When history gives out, fiction takes over.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Young people dislike and even fail to understand our slang; my gay students ask me what “tricking” means. It’s all old whore’s slang, of course.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“A genius must never be seen struggling to master his craft. He starts out already accomplished.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that’s the only “immortality” we’ll ever know on this dying planet.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“The French word for “plot,” trame, also means “heft” or “weave.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“I’m not sure what readers want.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“I’ve always associated reading and writing with sex.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Charles used to say, “If God had meant boys to be fucked, he would have put a hole in their ass.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Everything we wrote was submitted to the editors above us, grizzled Korean War pilots with buzz cuts and an encyclopedic knowledge, who would routinely bounce our copy back and demand “fixes” (“More color,” “Doesn’t track,” or simply “Huh?” written in the margin).”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“There’s something mystic and beautiful in the ineffable.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“When I did finally come to, I reported to Patrick that Valentino (not the dress designer but the silent movie star) had auditioned Patrick and me. At the climactic moment we had to twirl pantless, go into splits, and leave on the floor an inked impression of our anuses. Valentino had liked my impression more than Patrick’s and called me back for a second audition, which didn’t go so well.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

“Critics always praise precision in writing, and some great writers (Joyce, Beckett, Gustave Flaubert) are masters of clarity—but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness.”
― Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading