Many people like books because they’re suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real p… - Edmund White

I’d been waiting and waiting year after year to grow up so I could lead the gay life, and all the while I’d been wasting my most precious capital, my youth.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing.

Teenagers, flooded with destabilizing hormones and a longing for elsewhere, are particularly prone to the seductive power of dark narratives.