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" 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
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" 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 asked my body if it was going to die or not from AIDS. And it said 'no.' I sort of paid attention to that. "
Edmund White
Attention
Die
Going
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. "
Edmund White
Community
Gay
Political
" One of the side benefits of staying in the closet is you can have a much bigger career. "
Edmund White
Bigger
Career
Closet
" 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. "
Edmund White
Boy
Friend
Time
" '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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Trying
Monster
Man
" I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession. "
Edmund White
Always
Good
Quite
" I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission. "
Edmund White
Always
Never
Thought
" 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. "
Edmund White
Man
Nobody
You
" Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. "
Edmund White
Some
Thinks
Approach
" My father was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night so that he wouldn't have to see people. He ran a business with a large staff but would go there at night and leave things for them to do during the day when he wasn't there. "
Edmund White
Father
Day
People
" 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
" Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard. "
Edmund White
Me
Boy
Story
" Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better. "
Edmund White
Determined
Better
Worse
" 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. "
Edmund White
Life
Age
Looking
" 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 think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique. "
Edmund White
Aesthetic
Sincerity
Realism
" 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
" Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she'd assure them she wasn't. "
Edmund White
Her
Alive
Sometimes
" 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
" In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.' "
Edmund White
America
1950s
Been
" 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
" I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us - seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent. "
Edmund White
Adolescence
Everything
Injustice
" 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. "
Edmund White
Writing
City
Memories
" 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