The Sound of Things Falling’ may be a page turner, but it’s also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez’s prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean’s idiomatic English version. All the novel’s characters are well imagined, original and rounded. Edmund White Read Quote
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. Edmund White Read Quote
Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory. Edmund White Read Quote
I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn’t care later when I write about her. Edmund White Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. Edmund White Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique. Edmund White Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
