Edmund White

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

“Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I w...”

“In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Ow...”

“In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she...”

“I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.”

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

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

“I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to s...”