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
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
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
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
If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else. – Edmund White
If you’re a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been imported, and the water is shallow until you’ve waded far out, and all the way the sea floor is covered with yucky algae and sea grass. – Edmund White
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
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
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
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it’s no good, only I could have written those books. – Edmund White
America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts. – Edmund White
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
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. – Edmund White
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
Barack Obama’s decision to come out in favour of gay marriage may be a historic occasion, but it is not an isolated one. His administration has been making pro-gay noises for some time; his demographic in the upcoming election is young and educated, precisely the group that favours equality for the LGBT community. – Edmund White
‘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
The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties. – Edmund White
‘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. – Edmund White
I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. – Edmund White
I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer. – Edmund White
‘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
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
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
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
When my lover Hubert Sorin was dying of AIDS, he was always trying to fix me up – posthumously, as it were – with the cute busboy at the hotel. – Edmund White
The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian. – Edmund White
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