Edmund White Novelist Quotations

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.

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.

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.

With my gaudy, exotic material I wanted to create large, dreamy constructions that would not be decorative but powerfully expressive.

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

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.

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.

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.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.