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" In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else. "

Edmund White

Marriage

Will

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours. "

" 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. "

" A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people. "

" One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. "

" There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement. "

" As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together. "

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

Edmund White

Boy

Story

" When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute. "

Edmund White

Living

Paris

" 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

" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "

" Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in France got very angry. "

" 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. "

" I always feel I'm better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don't read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody. "

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

" 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. "