Albert Guerard Quotes

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.

As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn`t the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

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.

I didn`t want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

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.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it`s seized on, even when it`s a far from perfect fit.

If I take a less defensive tone, I`d admit that I couldn`t write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.

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.

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.

Of course the success of A Boy`s Own Story took me utterly off guard.

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

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

In the case of my book, I don`t think it`s really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he`s enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

Chivalry is the most delicate form of contempt.