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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard. "

Edmund White

Boy

Story

" While writing 'City Boy,' I relied mainly on my own memories. In particular, I was able to describe the effect of gay liberation on an individual life (mine) as events paralleled my own growing self-acceptance; in this case, the political truly was the personal. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked. "

" 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. "

" 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

Great

" The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book. "

" I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission. "

" I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. "

" I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique. "

" Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist. "

" Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. "

" 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. "

" Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. "

" It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack. "

" 'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to. "