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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.

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
Write
Jazzy
America
Defensive
States
Admit
Today
Contemporary
Look
Tone
Looks
Couldn
Take
Less
Writing
Desire

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At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
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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...
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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.
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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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Hell is God's Absence.
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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
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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
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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.
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Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
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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.
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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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Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
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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.
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All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
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In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.
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The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
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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.
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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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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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