Edmund White

(256 votes)   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.

Edmund White
1940-, American Writer

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(39 votes)   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.

Edmund White
1940-, American Writer

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(17 votes)   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
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(17 votes)   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
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(16 votes)   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.

Edmund White
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(16 votes)   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.

Edmund White
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(16 votes)   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.

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

Edmund White
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(15 votes)   With my gaudy, exotic material I wanted to create large, dreamy constructions that would not be decorative but powerfully expressive.

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

Edmund White
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(13 votes)   I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

Edmund White
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(11 votes)   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.

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

Edmund White
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