Edmund White Quotes (20 Quotes)

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.

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

I abandoned fiction for playwriting then for a number of years before taking it up again to write The Beautiful Room Is Empty in the mid-1960s.

I quickly discovered that I wrote best when I had an audience to read out loud to soon after the completion of my latest, hottest pages.

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.

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.

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

With my gaudy, exotic material I wanted to create large, dreamy constructions that would not be decorative but powerfully expressive.

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.

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

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.

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

There was a certain hum that would be generated by the book when I was writing well I'd stop working the instant that hum snapped off.

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.

I guess I felt I was lucky because history just happened to hand me all these empty niches, and it did fuel me. It is always exciting when you tap into some new subject matter.

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

But if all these things were the bits of tinsel and straw I made my nest out of, the way I felt while I worked was strangely different.

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having ''too much'' sex. At what point does a ''healthy'' amount become ''too much'' There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When ''morality'' is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.