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" I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be. "
Edmund White
Want
Write
Challenge
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" 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
" I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. "
Edmund White
Eyes
Happiness
Own
" I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique. "
Edmund White
Aesthetic
Sincerity
Realism
" These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
My Life
" 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
" Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better. "
Edmund White
Determined
Better
Worse
" 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 changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting. "
Edmund White
Writing
Gay
Stand
" It's true that Paris is made up of equal parts of social conservatism and anarchic experimentation, but foreigners never quite know where to place the moral accent mark. "
Edmund White
Place
Never
Moral
" There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing. "
Edmund White
Writing
Good
Great
" I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others. "
Edmund White
People
Blue
Down
" It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack. "
Edmund White
Writer
Always
Better
" 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative. "
Edmund White
Solitude
Beginning
Endure
" New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class. "
Edmund White
Class
New
Immigrant
" 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'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
" When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it. "
Edmund White
Loved
Beautiful
Child
" Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom. "
Edmund White
Now
Marriage
Like
" I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. "
Edmund White
Too
Good
French
" 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 used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color. "
Edmund White
Woman
Me
Color
" 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 first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. "
Edmund White
Empty
Beautiful
New York
" 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
" Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. "
Edmund White
Nothing
New
Lived
" One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. "
Edmund White
Bigger
Career
Closet
" 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
" I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience. "
Edmund White
Me
Truth
My Own
" 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
" I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined. "
Edmund White
Alive
Details
Imagination