Edmund White
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White IIIis an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. Probably his best-known books are The Joy of Gay Sexand his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Emptyand The Farewell Symphony...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 January 1940
CountryUnited States of America
cultural gay life men mix problem rarely seldom since strangers
Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).
basement chapter life seems talk
I think it's really interesting to talk about Foucault in one chapter and smelling poop in the basement in the next. It seems to me that life is just that complicated.
became editor saturday staff
I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'
money
I was always ambitious - not to make money: to be published.
It always seemed much better to be a writer - a Real Writer - than a successful hack.
abandoned again american-novelist beautiful empty fiction number room taking
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.
Paris can be like the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You can't leave.
age early everybody goes holy maybe origins sacred totally
From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.
bad beauty effect interested name terribly truth writer
My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.
french good
I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.
england french good known
I always feel I'm better known in England than I am here in the U.S. Americans don't read that much, and the French are very good at knowing the names of everybody.
everybody good quite though
I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.
death
I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.