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" Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard. "
Edmund White
Me
Boy
Story
Related Quotes:
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
Go
Living
Paris
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
New York
Angry
City
" It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack. "
Edmund White
Writer
Always
Better
" 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
" 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 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.' "
Edmund White
Working
Horizon
Review
" 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
" I've accompanied several dying people on their travels, and the desert seems to be a favored destination. It is very hot and dry and lyrical in its own way. "
Edmund White
Hot
Dying
People
" I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. "
Edmund White
Too
Good
French
" 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
" Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction. "
Edmund White
Community
Gay
Political
" 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'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined. "
Edmund White
Alive
Details
Imagination
" 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. "
Edmund White
Writing
Gay
Stand
" 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. "
Edmund White
People
American
Black
" 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
" In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion. "
Edmund White
Crown
Evidence
Feathers
" I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage. "
Edmund White
Myself
Order
Campaign
" Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught. "
Edmund White
Good
Life
Women
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Gay Marriage
Gay
Effort
" These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
My Life
" '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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Moment
History
Men
" 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. "
Edmund White
Yellow
Flower
Flowers
" 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