Edmund White

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

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.

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.

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

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.

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

Of course the success of A Boy’s Own Story took me utterly off guard.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it’s seized on, even when it’s a far from perfect fit.

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.

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.