“I've accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert...” — Edmund White Quote

I've accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert seems to be a favored destination. It is very hot and dry and lyrical in its own way.

In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught.

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.

Yoga is my all-time go to exercise. When I travel, a yoga mat accompanies me.

Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.

As a kid, when I accompanied Mom on a shoot, people would ask for my autograph as well.

I don't know all the inner workings of the Miami Dolphins locker room, but I do know the pain of being different, the sadness that accompanies not fitting in and the hopeless feeling of having no one to turn to, because it's part of my story as well.