Steve Erickson Quotes

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• I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

  Steve Erickson

  Ink, May, Pages

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• a dream is only a memory of the future

  Steve Erickson

  Dream, Memories

  Steve Erickson (1999). “The Sea Came in at Midnight”, Avon Books

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• If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

  Steve Erickson

  Congratulations, Self, Expression

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• It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt misogynist [Donald Trump] over the first woman president. Someone will have to explain that one to me someday.

  Steve Erickson

  Men, White Man, Voting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

  Steve Erickson

  Water, Swim, Shadow

  Steve Erickson (2013). “Rubicon Beach: A Novel”, p.77, Open Road Media

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• When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

  Steve Erickson

  War, Ideas, America

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• In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking

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• I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we're going to reconcile the America that elected the first African American president with the America that just elected a president avidly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan - I'm not sure I even want to reconcile the two.

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking, Two, Ku Klux Klan

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, civil rights and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side historically and morally, and that it took too much intellectual and psychological jujitsu to pretend otherwise. I didn't want to pretend anymore; I wanted to be on the right side.

  Steve Erickson

  Wings, Rights, Justice

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It became inescapable that as conservatives were wrong about people of color, they were also wrong about women. They were wrong about gay people. The only individual freedoms they seemed to get exercised about were the freedom to make a profit and the freedom to own a gun.

  Steve Erickson

  Gay, Gun, Color

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to that point and have the character make clear that he or she doesn't want to do that at all. That long phone conversation I thought the character was going to have? He hangs up the phone before the other person answers, and twenty pages of dialog I had half written in my head go out the window.

  Steve Erickson

  Character, Phones, Long

  "Steve Erickson and Zeroville: An Interview with a True American Original". Interview With Jeff VanderMeer, www.amazonbookreview.com. November 27, 2007.

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• To the extent that I've ever understood postmodernism - and I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I'm not one of them - one of its distinguishing traits is the story's awareness of its own artifice, and how that awareness becomes part of the story. And if that's right, then I have no idea how I ever got lumped into postmodernism except that I believe, since I was first published, people just haven't quite known where else to put me.

  Steve Erickson

  Believe, Ideas, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

  Steve Erickson

  Want, Lasts, Difficult

  "Steve Erickson and Zeroville: An Interview with a True American Original". Interview With Jeff VanderMeer, www.amazonbookreview.com. November 27, 2007.

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• I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

  Steve Erickson

  Stories, Way, Natural

  "Steve Erickson and Zeroville: An Interview with a True American Original". Interview With Jeff VanderMeer, www.amazonbookreview.com. November 27, 2007.

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• In terms of America, I think any profound consideration is bound to return us to the notion of twins because, though you certainly can contend there are many Americas, our history has been binary from the beginning, with its hairline fracture down the country's center between what American has wanted to be and what America has been. That fracture is slavery, of course. To some extent it's still slavery, in that collectively we refuse to come to grips with the American fact of slavery.

  Steve Erickson

  Country, Thinking, America

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like my judgmentalism; I didn't like my absolutism. I didn't like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses.

  Steve Erickson

  Emotional, Thinking, Generosity

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

  Steve Erickson

  Records, Today, Hearing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

  Steve Erickson

  Writing, Answers, Reason

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

  Steve Erickson

  Men, Taste, Diagrams

  Source: therumpus.net

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• While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.

  Steve Erickson

  Emotional, Thinking, Nerves

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking, Wind, Creative

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.

  Steve Erickson

  America, Western Music, Century

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The last thing I want is that sense of artifice - rather I want the reader drawn into the story and lost in it and vested in it. So the emotional connection is everything, albeit a connection on my terms.

  Steve Erickson

  Emotional, Connections, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.

  Steve Erickson

  Two, America, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.

  Steve Erickson

  Sex, Memories, Rip

  Source: therumpus.net

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