" We shiver with pleasure at stories of Pollack pissing into bourgeois fireplaces. What was rare about Edmund’s case, thrilling to me, appalling to Merrill, was that he felt compelled to piss into the intellectual fireplace. Even more important, he did so without ever rejecting conventional intellectual and artistic standards. So, not a revolution, but a coup. And, as if his art were as harmless as a dove’s, it all sounded like cooing. "

― Tom Cardamone , Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book