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
novel novelist straight
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
american-novelist book certain hum instant snapped stop
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.
american-novelist create decorative exotic material
With my gaudy, exotic material I wanted to create large, dreamy constructions that would not be decorative but powerfully expressive.
american-novelist audience best completion discovered hottest loud quickly soon wrote
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.
american-novelist bits felt nest strangely straw worked
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.
basically clothes drag historical maybe modern novelists people putting sort taking
There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're basically taking modern people and putting them in old drag - it's sort of the 'Gone With the Wind' approach.
american-novelist biography discovery fiction performance requires wants whereas
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.
age although closest crucial early giving grants hard judge late life looking needed novelist ought people period supporting twenties worth
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement.
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.
american-novelist beautiful empty room submitted version york
The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.
cunning enigmatic evidence god isaac produce refuses singer
In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.
life lived
Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
driver enmity hostility immediate
The natural enmity between leaver and left is like the absolute, immediate and always shifting hostility between driver and pedestrian.
deeper fan oftentimes richer suggest
I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.