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

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

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.
Edmund White

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

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.
Edmund White

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

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

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

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

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

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