Edmund White Quotes

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

A great story poorly told doesn't do anybody any good at all, and nobody wants to hear it, and nobody wants to read it. The craft of it is really more important than the subject matter.

I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.

I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Do the story in the way it really demands to be done, which may mean using several different styles or only one style; but it's still about respecting the story.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.