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" I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful. "
Edmund White
Out
Anything
Five
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" AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. "
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Won
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" Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books. "
Edmund White
Feel
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Good
" Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. "
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People
Most
Little
" Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. "
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" 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
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Long
Possibilities
" There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach. "
Edmund White
People
Wind
Eating
" The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something. "
Edmund White
Man
Nobody
You
" In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory. "
Edmund White
Boy
Friend
Time
" I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique. "
Edmund White
Aesthetic
Sincerity
Realism
" When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist. "
Edmund White
Socialist
Saying
College
" Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting. "
Edmund White
Gay
Marriage
Fight
" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "
Edmund White
Tell
Matter
How
" 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. "
Edmund White
Hot
Dying
People
" America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts. "
Edmund White
Identity
Law
Politics
" The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian. "
Edmund White
Like
Always
Natural
" Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section. "
Edmund White
Black
People
Look
" It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack. "
Edmund White
Writer
Always
Better
" 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
" The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier. "
Edmund White
People
Thought
History
" Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels... tacky. "
Edmund White
Dialogue
Writing
Sex
" 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. "
Edmund White
Truth
Beauty
Honesty
" Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet. "
Edmund White
Moral
Habit
Know
" Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction). "
Edmund White
Fiction
Faults
Distance
" If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire. "
Edmund White
Today
Look
Desire
" My father was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night so that he wouldn't have to see people. He ran a business with a large staff but would go there at night and leave things for them to do during the day when he wasn't there. "
Edmund White
Father
Day
People
" One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. "
Edmund White
Bigger
Career
Closet
" '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
" Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man. "
Edmund White
Trying
Monster
Man
" Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life). "
Edmund White
Friends
Problem
Parents
" Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization. "
Edmund White
Organization
Research
Performance