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" I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. "
Edmund White
Eyes
Happiness
Own
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" '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 suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s - progressive and an atheist. "
Edmund White
Someone
People
Man
" I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit. "
Edmund White
Landscape
Book
Empty
" 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
" Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. "
Edmund White
Nothing
New
Lived
" 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
" I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. "
Edmund White
Too
Good
French
" 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
" 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
" If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others... I wouldn't have been impelled to live in New York and choose the hard poverty of bohemia over the soft comfort of the business world. "
Edmund White
Eyes
Myself
New York
" I've always deplored bad heterosexual values that dictate the minute a marriage is over the former partners no longer speak to each other; only straights could be so cruel and inhuman as to reject totally the person with whom they've shared their life for 20 or 30 years. "
Edmund White
Marriage
Speak
Values
" Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos. "
Edmund White
Changes
History
Gay
" 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
" 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
" Barack Obama's decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community. "
Edmund White
Gay
Decision
Time
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique. "
Edmund White
Aesthetic
Sincerity
Realism
" Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy. "
Edmund White
Gay
Early
Negative
" 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'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
" These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
My Life
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. "
Edmund White
Published
Always
Make
" 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