There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction. - Edmund White

Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing?

I like to read great books not because I’m hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won’t be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.

Guy believed everything in sex should be done slowly so as not to scare the wildlife and to ensure his own natural grace and poise.