A Quote by Edmund White
My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.
Related Quotes
I'm less interested in uniqueness than in goodness. I see so many concerts where the program notes are more interesting than the music. I remember talking to one composer who went through the most complicated mathematical algorithm to generate some material from scratch. It took weeks and weeks, and he came up with a C major chord. For me, honesty is more interesting than originality.
I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty. Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.... I think beauty is an expression of love.
Doth perfect beauty stand in need of praise at all? Nay; no more than law, no more than truth, no more than loving kindness, nor than modesty.
I always just wanted to have the wherewithal to make another record. I never really dreamt of fortune or fame, because it seemed so unlikely. I'm much more interested in people's perceptions of me than what my life is really like. It appears that some people think it's all cocaine and caviar for Okkervil River. And it's not. I'm making a little bit more than I was making at the video store right now.
Because I am a bad girl, people always automatically think that I am a bad girl. Or that I carry a dark secret with me or that I'm obsessed with death. The truth is that I am probably the least morbid person one can meet. If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.
I love a ghost story. I think they affect me more than other people that are much more skeptical than I am. I think that it's good that I do buy into them to some degree.
A right mind and generous affection hath more beauty and charms than all other symmetries in the world besides; and a grain of honesty and native worth is of more value than all the adventitious ornaments, estates, or preferments; for the sake of which some of the better sort so oft turn knaves.
I come from a loving, supportive family, and my mother taught me that there are more valuable ways to achieve beauty than just through your external features. She was focused on compassion and respect, and those are the things that ended up translating to me as beauty.
When I was younger I was influenced by Kanye, his story of coming up and how he kept producing and producing and saying, 'I'm more than just a producer. I'm more than just a writer. I'm more than just a guy in the studio here to give you ideas. I have a story.'
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
When I think about that kind of spirit, I think about my mother, who is standing here with me tonight. My mother is the embodiment of what it means to have a Texas spirit, because she wanted nothing more than for her children to have a better life than she had, to have an education beyond the ninth-grade education that she had, to live happier lives, more successful ones than she had been able to live. And you know what? She raised the daughter who ran for governor.
It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are.
I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.
Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.
For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.
I guess both Nabokov and Popper had, in different ways, immunized me against the fashion for French-influenced literary theory in the '70s, '80s, and '90s - "immunized" in the sense that they made me no longer susceptible to this epidemic cultural virus. I looked into Derrida and found that he rarely seemed to be interested in truth; he was more interested in making a splash.
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