When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.
Tags: you, me, beautiful, love

Other Quotes by "Edmund White"

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 stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
Tags: gay, new, matter, style
The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.
Tags: first, empty, new, beautiful
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
Tags: about, worry, gay, people
I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
Tags: dying, things, think, death
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 was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her.
Tags: pain, world, beautiful, love
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