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" 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. "

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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

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

" Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't have to get married myself in order to campaign on behalf of gay marriage. "

" I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre. "

" 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. "

" 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

Color

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission. "

" Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better. "

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

" Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can't leave. "

Edmund White

Paris

You

" 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. "

" 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

" 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

Living

Paris

" 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. "

" 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. "