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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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Edmund White
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 13
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Memoirist
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Cincinnati
Ohio
Edmund Valentine White III
Form
Littles
Avenging
Little
Biography
Great
Biographies
People
Forms
Judgment
Middle
Class

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At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
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Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
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Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.
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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.
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Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.
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I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.
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I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
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These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
Edmund White
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In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.
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I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
Edmund White
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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
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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
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Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger - it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.
Edmund White
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I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
Edmund White
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Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
Edmund White
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The scorn directed against drags is especially virulent they have become the outcasts of gay life, the queers of homosexuality.In fact, they are classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.
Edmund White
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Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
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Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.
Edmund White
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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.
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The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.
Edmund White