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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• Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.

  Alden Nowlan

  Writing, Thinking, Gone

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• It's been so long since a talented writer last occupied the White House; no wonder, then, that American writers have been among the most prominent of all the demographic groups claiming a piece of Barack Obama for themselves.

  Jonathan Raban

  White, Long, House

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook”, p.462, Pan Macmillan

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• Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

  Toni Morrison

  Latin, Writing, Black

  Newsweek Interview, March 30, 1981.

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• Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

  Sherman Alexie

  Writing, Native American, Ironic

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• Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

  Donald Barthelme

  War, World, Formal

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• The culturally specific, in particular, the American porch play that American writers have cherished and loved for many years in terms of their new writing, has seemed to have very little relevance to a much more fast-flowing, abstract, experimental drama that has been emerging in [the UK]. The porch play, not to mention that thing of, Oops, I wasn't loved enough by my father, somehow didn't have the relevance in this country.

  Stephen Daldry

  Country, Father, Drama

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• It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often.... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.

  H. L. Mencken

  New York, Years, California

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• I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

  Anne Rice

  Country, Doubt, European Countries

  "A Fan's Interview with Anne Rice". Penguin Random House Inerview, www.randomhouse.com.

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• American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

  Grant Morrison

  Dog, Powerful, Writing

  "The Super Psyche of Comic Book Shaman Grant Morrison". Interview with Gavin Edwards, www.playboy.com. April 18, 2012.

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• I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

  Kiran Desai

  Tennessee, Truman

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• Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

  Jackie Chan

  Directors, Film, American Film

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• American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

  Don DeLillo

  Reality, Bedtime, Dangerous

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.46, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Kings, Queens, Native American

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• 'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

  Mark Helprin

  Party, Garden, Example

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• I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

  Donna Tartt

  Writing, Literature, Admire

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• I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.

  Lisa Scottoline

  Book, Writing, Stories

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• There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Book, White, Fiction

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• Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

  Adam Hochschild

  War, Political, Partisans

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.

  Norman Lear

  Two, African American, Green

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• Stephen [King], who wrote the script himself, was on the set [of The Stand], and I was just so fortunate to get to know him. What a wonderful man. He may go down in history as the greatest American writer, pound for pound.

  Rob Lowe

  Kings, Men, May

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Latin, Book, Reading

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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• I always read the Latin American writers. I love so many of them: Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector. I also love a lot of American experimental writers and surrealist European writers. But perhaps The Persian Book of Kings was the greatest influence - I encourage people to look at it. There is such a wealth of incredible stories.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Kings, Latin, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have a well-balanced show. It's 50/50 on men/women, and also African-American/white writers, it's the same thing. I have four African-American writers, and four non-African-American writers.

  Wanda Sykes

  Men, White, African American

  Source: www.avclub.com

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