American Writer Quotes

• I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

  Jack London

  Sleep, Atoms, Writing Words

  Quoted in Bulletin (San Francisco), 2 Dec. 1916.

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• The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

  John Cheever

  Rain, Taken, Writing

  "The Journals of John Cheever" by Robert Gottlieb, 1963.

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• I love a lot of American writers, but I think that for the most part the scope of what's accepted as great American writing is very limited. What we have is good, but it's limited. There's not enough engagement with the world. Our literature's not adventurous enough. The influence of MFA writing tends to make things repetitive. The idea that writing can be taught has changed the whole conversation in the U.S.

  Rabih Alameddine

  Writing, Thinking, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Ten Little Indians once again shows [Alexie] to be not just one of the West’s best, but one of the most brilliantly literate American writers, even funnier than Louise Erdrich, even more primal than Jim Harrison, and even more eloquent than Annie Proulx.

  Ron Franscell

  Littles, West, Annie

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• The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.

  Scott Turow

  Voice, Guilds

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• American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

  Gore Vidal

  Want

  'Two Sisters' (1970) p. 65

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• The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

  Edward Abbey

  College, London, Mark

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.32, RosettaBooks

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• Fantasy doesn't have to be fantastic. American writers in particular find this much harder to grasp. You need to have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds. The cute dragon that sits on your shoulder also craps all down your back, but this makes it more interesting because it gives it an added dimension.

  Terry Pratchett

  Cute, Writing, Clouds

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• Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers, which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject. So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn't expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.

  Adam Morris

  Football, Latin, Unique

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible to what I've experienced, to what I've lived and been in a position to witness. I realize now that as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don't know about or wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe there's an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.

  Francisco Goldman

  Responsibility, Realizing, Responsible

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

  Michael Cunningham

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's this great fashion among writers, especially those who follow the transnational conservatives like V.S. Naipaul, to disavow one's place in the world as a sort of box that has sprung you but is only worthy of your scorn, because it once contained you. And I've been tempted to say foolish things, like "I am an American writer" or "I belong nowhere," but the truth is I'm perfectly proud of identifying as an Indian writer, even if that might hurt my bottom line.

  Karan Mahajan

  Fashion, Hurt, World

  Source: therumpus.net

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• First of all, I don't think of myself as a northern Michigan writer. I think of myself as an American writer who happens - and yes, by choice, and for a long time now - to live in this particular place, and where, as the joke goes, there are only three seasons: July, August, and winter.

  Jack Driscoll

  Winter, Thinking, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The Americans only like things they can label, even if it kills them. Think of those poor Latin American writers. Some of them are very good. But the "magical realism" label has absolutely ruined them. The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

  Gore Vidal

  Latin, Thinking, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.

  James McBride

  Opportunity, African American, Black

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

  Gore Vidal

  Class, Difficult, Deals

  Gore Vidal (1991). “A view from the diners club: essays 1987-1991”

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• Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.

  John Lukacs

  Writing, Two, Everyday

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• The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

  Virginia Woolf

  Real, Home, Leaves Of Grass

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3129, Delphi Classics

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• During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer.

  Ron Paul

  Country, War, Fighting

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• Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.

  Jami Attenberg

  Book, Criticism, Males

  "Interview With Jami Attenberg, Author of 'The Melting Season'". Interview with Teddy Wayne, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

  Jess Row

  Writing, Race, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Crap, Ifs

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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• You know what needs to be done when you're a writer. You know what the job is, particularly if you're an African American writer, or if you deal with people, or if your subjects are poor people or people who need voice. So you don't really need to know whether or not you are doing the right thing. What you have to be wary of if you're doing the right thing to the right level that will surpass your own life. I'm hoping that my work will surpass my own life.

  James McBride

  Jobs, Voice, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American, I have been pampered enough myself to know how it can make your life too frictionless.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Fellowship, Foundation, Enough

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• It's the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country - to get a better view.

  Laurie Anderson

  Country, Views, Order

  Interview with A.M. Homes, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 2, 2015.

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