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" The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book. "
Edmund White
Students
Impact
Book
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" 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
" 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'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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
Talk
Everything
Role
" A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people. "
Edmund White
Worry
Gay
About
" 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
" 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
" 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
" These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. "
Edmund White
Life
Me
My Life
" 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. "
Edmund White
Organization
Research
Performance
" 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
" Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved, and now I am a reluctant groom. "
Edmund White
Now
Marriage
Like
" 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
" 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 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
" Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard. "
Edmund White
Me
Boy
Story
" The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors. "
Edmund White
Empty
Beautiful
New York
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Edmund White
City
Long
Nation
" Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can't leave. "
Edmund White
Like
Paris
You
" Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. "
Edmund White
People
Most
Little
" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "
Edmund White
Tell
Matter
How
" 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
" 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