Steve Erickson Quotes

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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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  2 Copy quote

• I have members of my immediate family, and my wife's immediate family, who voted for Donald Trump, and now there's this gulf that I have no interest in bridging however much I love those people. It's almost like the Civil War.

  Steve Erickson

  War, People, Wife

  Source: therumpus.net

  0 Copy quote

• 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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• 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

  1 Copy quote

• 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

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  3 Copy quote

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

  Steve Erickson

  Thinking

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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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• To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

  Steve Erickson

  Fiction, Sake, Not Interested

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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

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  0 Copy quote

• Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

  Steve Erickson

  Strong, Book, Character

  0 Copy quote

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

  Steve Erickson

  America, Western Music, Century

  Source: therumpus.net

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  0 Copy quote

• The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

  Steve Erickson

  Expression, Stories, Sometimes

  Source: therumpus.net

  0 Copy quote

• One of the reasons I'm not so keen on people calling me an "experimental" writer is that it suggests the work is about the experiment, when it's always the opposite - any "experimentation" is dictated by the material.

  Steve Erickson

  Opposites, People, Calling

  Source: therumpus.net

  0 Copy quote

• In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.

  Steve Erickson

  Character, Essence, Notion

  Source: therumpus.net

  0 Copy quote

• 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

  0 Copy quote

• There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture.

  Steve Erickson

  War, White, Culture

  Source: therumpus.net

  0 Copy quote

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