Top 34 American Literary Quotes
#1. I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.
Macaulay Culkin
#2. In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.
Tony D'Souza
#3. The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Will Self
#4. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#5. I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing ... is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this - the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.
Harper Lee
#6. Anonymous sources are a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century, a relatively recent practice. The literary tradition of anonymity goes back to the Bible.
Joe Klein
#7. The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
Henry James
#8. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.
William H Gass
#10. 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
#12. 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.
#13. ...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.
#14. I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville.
James Purdy
#16. One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
Victor LaValle
#17. The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.
Will Self
#18. It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence.
Edward Bok
#19. It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#20. Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
#21. 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
#22. The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.
Edmund Morgan
#23. And the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
Henry James
#24. 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.
#25. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.
Howard Mumford Jones
#27. The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess,
Sam Tanenhaus
#28. We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands.
Edward Jay Epstein
#29. 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.
#30. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#31. What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
#32. 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
#34. It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much.
Terry Teachout
