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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" My father was a sort of John Wayne Texan who'd worked as a cowboy when he was young. He'd participated in rattlesnake round-ups and swum with copperheads. "

" The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" Key West is the place where your sickly house plant back in New York grows to 10 ft. It's also the place where an 8-ft. cactus, the century plant, produces a huge yellow flower every great once in a while, like a robot proffering a bouquet. After the plant flowers, it dies. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. "

Beautiful Woman

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

" I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "