Edmund White American Novelist Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.