Top 100 American Fiction Quotes
#1. American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
Gary Shteyngart
#2. In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.
Paul Elie
#3. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#4. IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#5. Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.
Pat Conroy
#6. All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#7. There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.
John Hodgman
#8. If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest ... she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.
Ned Rorem
#9. Contemporary American fiction has become cheap counseling to the bereaved bourgeois.
Anis Shivani
#10. I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
Walter Kirn
#11. You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#12. If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.
Albert Brooks
#13. I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don't think it's a question of "this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn't." I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It's totally impossible.
Chad Harbach
#14. When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."
Sandra Cisneros
#15. Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing ...
Ellen Glasgow
#16. The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#17. Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world?
Kamila Shamsie
#18. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#19. The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.
George Pelecanos
#20. The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community.
Joshua Cohen
#21. Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?'
She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start.
L.J.Smith
#22. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#23. There's no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. 'The Wire' and 'Deadwood' and 'The Sopranos.'
Kevin Barry
#25. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#26. I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
William Gibson
#27. Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can.
Gloria Mallette
#28. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#29. For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
Daniel Alarcon
#30. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#31. Guilt doesn't follow the rules of time. Most things fade with time, regret, eyesight, memories. But guilt feeds on time, and as it feeds, it grows, and when it runs out of time, it begins to gnaw on the guilty.
J.D. Mason
#32. I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
William Gibson
#33. Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time.
Donald Hays
#34. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#35. I studied how to use the clothes washer. The handy instructions on the lid helped; so did the box of suds. It instructed me to separate the whites from the coloreds. Laundry will be the last American institution to desegregate.
Huston Piner
#36. American houses ... ' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
Zadie Smith
#37. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#38. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#39. Ephram broke through. "You kiss me, woman! Don't let sorrow steal 'way truth. Don't blaspheme who we is.
Cynthia Bond
#40. The crack in your heart allows light in. ~ GOOD FORTUNE page 238
Leslie Bratspis
#41. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#42. Pastor McFucking Bride this ... Pastor McFucking Bride that. Fuck him!
S.B. Redd
#43. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#44. My teeth ache, my gums hurt, and my cat is tearing me apart, wanting you in every way imaginable. Your body. Your magic. Your fire spirit. Your blood.
N.D. Jones
#45. Christians are the salt of the earth ... Nothing grows where they've been.
Donald Hays
#46. I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
Robert Morgan
#47. Entering the foyer, Royale already decided that he would thank Shake once more for being by his side at Keena's recital. But she stunned him by eagerly waiting for him just like old times - on her knees wearing only a collar and a leash.
S.B. Redd
#48. Sci-fi doesn't show me much about alien's nature but shows a lot about North American nature.
Robin Sacredfire
#49. There were many tomorrows to be lived through his children. He could only hope that they would face them more courageously than he had, that his mistakes would serve as warning signs rather than crutches to lean on.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#50. The American obsession with 'Downton' amuses me slightly because it's such a fiction. I've always been questioned about my historical veracity, and 'Downton' just flies past, when it's completely made up.
Michael Hirst
#51. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.
Michael J. Findley
#52. Nick Yablon ranges widely, from log cabins to skyscrapers and from Tocqueville to pulp fiction. He combines imaginative research with probing interpretation. Untimely Ruins offers fresh and challenging insights about the American built environment on nearly every page.
T. J. Jackson Lears
#53. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#54. On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey?
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#55. Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.
Dinaw Mengestu
#56. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]
David Foster Wallace
#57. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoe S. Roy
#58. It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#59. What got my interested in science fiction was actually the American space program.
Ronald D. Moore
#60. Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.
Kate Williams
#61. See, you don't wanna be a Jew. Too much work--there's a lot of holidays but it's even more work. It's sanctioned oppression, it's God's tyranny.
Shawn Stewart Ruff
#62. I took one look at him, my mouth started watering and my panties moistened with thick fluid as if he had touched my sensation and made me instantaneously combust.
Siva D.
#63. He watched the young actress playing the central part of a wife who mistakenly believes her husband has wronged her. She was overly trained in the teapot school of acting, striking expressive poses and attitudes as the mood of the story demanded.
Stephen Harrigan
#64. 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
#65. The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.
Geoffrey Wood
#66. It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.'
Joe Haldeman
#67. My great-great grandfather and I were the best of friends, although we never met
Raji Singh
#68. Time had taught him that whether his sins were pardoned or left unforgiven, they would remain committed. Tomorrow he would hopefully choose wiser, with a stronger measure of compassion.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#69. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#70. Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God's green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#71. I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. - Carol Kennicott
Sinclair Lewis
#72. The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#73. Live life to the fullest and never forget the people that supported you along the way.
Dorothy W. Cosey
#74. We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.
John Green
#75. For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.
Gene Luen Yang
#76. When I'm working, I always read stuff that's as far away from what I'm working on as possible, so I'll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.
Mal Peet
#77. When you turn around, you'll see something I bet you've never seen before. If it takes your breath away, then you'll fit in nicely. If you don't feel anything, then maybe you don't belong here.
Veronica Randolph Batterson
#78. The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can't stop.
Laura Esquivel
#79. Remember, philosophically speaking, Americans are mongrels - practical materialists but with a dreamy streak of divine approval.
Geoffrey Wood
#81. Yes, 1960's North American sitcoms have led me to study the United States 1920's and 1930's crime bosses - QET Jenkins
Kim Welsman
#82. Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.
Michael Rogin
#83. Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?
Rick Bass
#85. American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg.
Dennis Etchison
#86. He now realized that right and wrong were intertwined notions. His arms could not differentiate between just and unjust causes. They only knew that they were empty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#87. I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.
Berenice Bejo
#89. Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#90. In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine.
Richie Gerber
#91. The trick set me up. It's that simple.
Shadez
#92. ...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#93. With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.
Kingsley Amis
#94. Mayor Walmsley is using the typical Jim Crow manipulation tactics to deflect the blame and guilt. He's a classic racist politician with an ulterior motive," says Ora.
Shaune Bordere
#95. When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#96. There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction.
Gary Shteyngart
#97. Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!
Kailin Gow
#98. Lucas George (Walton) (b.1944), American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He wrote and directed the science-fiction film Star Wars (1977),
Amazon Dictionary Account
#99. No, Margaret Atwood writes literature, whereas I write fiction. I'm from the American Midwest, so literature is beyond my abilities.
Stella Atrium
#100. You're an incredible woman, Lela. I would battle a thousand Terrademons to reach your heart. But I cannot challenge or defeat an enemy that's already dead. I cannot fight for a heart that doesn't want to be won.
N.D. Jones
