These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected. Edmund White Read Quote
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. Edmund White Read Quote
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. Edmund White Read Quote
I didn’t get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I’d written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful. Edmund White Read Quote
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.’ Edmund White Read Quote
Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the ‘market.’ I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone – that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote ‘Forgetting Elena,’ the first novel I got published. Edmund White Read Quote
It always seemed much better to be a writer – a Real Writer – than a successful hack. Edmund White Read Quote
I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission. Edmund White Read Quote
The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in ‘City Boy,’ the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the ‘New York Review of Books,’ and good friends of mine in France got very angry. Edmund White Read Quote
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. Edmund White Read Quote
