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" Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. "
Edmund White
People
Most
Little
Related Quotes:
" I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
Great
" In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc. "
Edmund White
Man
Experience
Book
" In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes by the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. The city seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation. "
Edmund White
City
Long
Nation
" These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
My Life
" Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom. "
Edmund White
Now
Marriage
Like
" 'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded. "
Edmund White
Fate
Meditation
Quality
" I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. "
Edmund White
Eyes
Happiness
Own
" Since, in the best Southern tradition, I was named Edmund Valentine White III, sometimes when people look up my books on Amazon they find 'Chocolate Drops from the South' by my grandfather. "
Edmund White
Tradition
Chocolate
Best
" I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession. "
Edmund White
Always
Good
Quite
" I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee. "
Edmund White
Soul
Thought
People
" The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there. "
Edmund White
Talk
Everything
Role
" 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. "
Edmund White
Key
Remember
People
" When I was young, I despised old people. I was provincial and narrow-minded. It's the reason I stayed stupid so long. If you only get involved with young people you don't learn anything about the world. "
Edmund White
Learn
People
Stupid
" First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.' "
Edmund White
Good
Gay
Fight
" The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. State after state had legalized gay marriage, despite intense opposition from the religious right. "
Edmund White
Gay
Right
Long
" I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects. "
Edmund White
Spirit
Long
Possibilities
" Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published. "
Edmund White
Alone
Young
Too Much
" I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her. "
Edmund White
Care
Home
Father
" Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. "
Edmund White
Community
Gay
Political
" From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent. "
Edmund White
Age
Serious
Me
" Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. "
Edmund White
Some
Thinks
Approach
" When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up - posthumously, as it were - with the cute busboy at the hotel. "
Edmund White
Hotel
Cute
Always
" I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.' "
Edmund White
Working
Horizon
Review
" If you're a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been imported, and the water is shallow until you've waded far out, and all the way the sea floor is covered with yucky algae and sea grass. "
Edmund White
Sea
Sand
Key
" I asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said 'no.' I sort of paid attention to that. "
Edmund White
Attention
Die
Going
" 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. "
Edmund White
You
People
American
" AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. "
Edmund White
Won
AIDS
Privileged
" I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. "
Edmund White
Published
Always
Make
" When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it's pure obstinacy that keeps me from reciprocating her passion. As I explain to her that I'm gay, it sounds, even to me, like a silly excuse; I scarcely believe it myself. "
Edmund White
Woman
Myself
Me
" I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage. "
Edmund White
Myself
Order
Campaign