Latest Steve Erickson Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If you're a smart writer, you listen.

  Steve Erickson

  Smart, Ifs

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Half the country seceded from the other half when Abraham Lincoln was elected because half the country couldn't abide his position on slavery. You would think 150 years later this had all become pretty historically incontestable. Yet millions continue to contest it in the face of history. Rather the denial of slavery and all its monstrous repercussions defines to one twin America what the country is and means, and therein is the DNA of those "alternative facts" that people believe when they can't stand to believe the truth.

  Steve Erickson

  Country, Believe, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Steve Erickson

  America, Western Music, Century

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.

  Steve Erickson

  Kids, Men, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

  Steve Erickson

  Hands, Order, Becoming

  Source: therumpus.net

• One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greater individual freedom grows - is just flatly contradicted by crucial junctures in the country's life, most conspicuously in the 1860s and 1960s, when it's been the federal government that's interceded against the states to secure individual freedom.

  Steve Erickson

  Country, Philosophical, Government

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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