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" 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
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" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
People
Wind
Eating
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Place
Never
Moral
" 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
" Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction). "
Edmund White
Fiction
Faults
Distance
" 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
" It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack. "
Edmund White
Writer
Always
Better
" If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire. "
Edmund White
Today
Look
Desire
" 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
" '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. "
Edmund White
Solitude
Beginning
Endure
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Dialogue
Writing
Sex
" Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better. "
Edmund White
Determined
Better
Worse
" 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. "
Edmund White
Identity
Young
Things
" 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
" The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier. "
Edmund White
People
Thought
History
" 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
" 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
" Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting. "
Edmund White
Gay
Marriage
Fight
" I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage. "
Edmund White
Myself
Order
Campaign
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Cowboy
John
Sort
" When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it's pure obstinacy that keeps me from reciprocating her passion. As I explain to her that I'm gay, it sounds, even to me, like a silly excuse; I scarcely believe it myself. "
Edmund White
Woman
Myself
Me
" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "
Edmund White
Tell
Matter
How
" 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. "
Edmund White
Soul
Thought
People
" 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
" 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
" 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 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. "
Edmund White
Key
Remember
People