American Writer Quotes

#1. 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

#2. It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

Margaret Anderson

#3. I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.

Isabel Allende

#4. Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

Pat Conroy

#5. I kind of want to be seen as an American writer, not just a New York writer.

Jami Attenberg

#6. I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.

Brian Lumley

#7. The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Rex Stout

#8. Regardless if a person likes my book I've earned the title: An American Writer.

Jonathan Heatt

#9. When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

Martin Amis

#10. But 8 years ago, he found himself unexpectedly falling in love when he was in his 77th year, with Bill Hayes, a younger American writer. He opened himself up to love and he now has someone to share his life with. His life is a lesson that it is never too late to fall in love.

Oliver Jack

#11. 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

#12. I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.

Dinaw Mengestu

#13. When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

Howard Mumford Jones

#14. I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.

Daniel Alarcon

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

Donna Tartt

#16. Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

Ha-Joon Chang

#17. To an American writer, I should think it must be a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the newspapers.

Frances Trollope

#18. One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly."
~ (1919-), American writer, producer, humorist.

Andy Rooney

#19. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Daniel Alarcon

#20. American writer
1803-1882
Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.

Diane Ackerman

#21. There's a book called 'Where The Wild Things Are,' by American writer Maurice Sendak ... it really is the most sublime book. It's a picture book, but it works at so many levels, and it's fantastic.

Graeme Base

#22. Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.

Philip Roth

#23. 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

#24. As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and triumphed matters. For every story that belongs to you, in time, belongs to America.

Andrew Lam

#25. 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

#26. I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.

Edmund White

#27. Every time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous. They don't make sense.

Jackie Chan

#28. I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

Nelson Algren

#29. Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer.

Teju Cole

#30. 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

#31. Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.

John Green

#32. Among the many queer things about the American economy is this: A writer can get more money for a bungling speech at a bankrupt college than he can get for a short-story masterpiece. What's more, he can sell the speech over and over again, and no one complains.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#33. 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

#34. Food critic and writer Waverley Root described the common American near beer as "such a wishy-washy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a Puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever."[21]

Waverly Root

#35. I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

Gore Vidal

#36. Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.

Susan Sontag

#37. In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.

Patrick Ness

#38. I think every American kid grows up dreaming about being in the movies. That's completely normal for us. But I mostly wanted to be a writer, and I got taught the scriptwriting program.

David Labrava

#39. I was trained to serve the writer and director as an actor before I serve myself. Not to say that's gotten in my way, but that's a different way of working than most American actors work.

Robert Englund

#40. One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.

Peter Coyote

#41. I am a huge, raving fan of writer Matt Fraction. His semi-indie 'Casanova' series is an ongoing masterpiece of 21st-century American comics - and his run on 'Immortal Iron Fist' with Ed Brubaker was pure, yummy martial-arts-fantasy deliciousness.

Michael Chabon

#42. I'm Jewish, and my family is Jewish. I was very interested in Woody Allen when I was growing up, but I don't think of myself as a Jewish writer. I'm more from suburbia, American suburbia. I'm more from the '70s than I am from Judaism.

Charlie Kaufman

#43. When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.

Aleksandar Hemon

#44. The writer Richard Manning has argued that 'the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.

Phillip Connors

#45. Who is as free as a writer? Nadie es tan libre como un escritor . . . No one is as free as a writer!

Sofia Espinoza Alvarez

#46. Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times ...
... Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on ...
Quote on the Title Page of Love TORN Asunder

Elizabeth Funderbirk

#47. When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther's man country's hero a tyrant, a dictator or a murderer and favor the next just to divide and conquer the people.

Henry Johnson Jr

#48. I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things.

G. Willow Wilson

#49. It is more worthy in the eyes of God ... if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.

Garrison Keillor

#50. 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

#51. I don't live my life as a writer. I'm a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does - cook and a little bit of cleaning.

Terry McMillan

#52. I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.

Bob Shacochis

#53. (Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

Howard Kerr

#54. I'm a writer. These people are American nomads, forever on the move, trying to feed themselves and their families. I'm thinking about writing a book about them. My name is John Steinbeck. Perhaps you've heard of me." After

Homer Hickam

#55. IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.

Shiree McCarver

#56. 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

#57. I think I always knew I would be a writer some day, but it wasn't until I was grown and had children of my own that I turned to telling Native American stories.

Joseph Bruchac

#58. To the extent that the short story is an art, Sturgeon is the American short-story writer.

Samuel R. Delany

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

Gore Vidal

#60. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

#61. 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

#62. I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.

Francis Ford Coppola

#63. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

Robert Lowell

#64. The Guild is the authoritative voice of American writers.

Scott Turow

#65. I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

E.L. Doctorow

#66. Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#67. He lay beside me all those years while I turned and twisted myself to fit beside him...

Elaine Kraf

#68. I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

Edward Abbey

#69. At the most basic level of protecting a writer's personal safety, democratic countries offer a further advantage. If you steal hundreds of thousands of documents from the Russian state and put them online, the FSB will try to kill you. Steal American secrets, and the CIA will not.

Nick Cohen

#70. Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?

Etgar Keret

#71. When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

Jeffrey Klarik

#72. I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

Richard Ford

#73. One of the things that takes a bit of getting used to on an American series is having a different director, and often writer, every week.

Gina Bellman

#74. I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American.

Robert Englund

#75. There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

Susan Sontag

#76. A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.

Howard Zinn

#77. With the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched ...

Katherine Anne Porter

#78. When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.

Nick Tosches

#79. After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater through and through.

Dee Dee Myers

#80. Any writer who presents an American home today where the television is not the head of the family is living in a fantasy world.

Kurt Vonnegut

#81. Check out my interview with Kostya Kennedy on themodern online. Sports Illustrated writer and author of Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. It may change your mind, one way or the other.

Kostya Kennedy

#82. If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

William S. Burroughs

#83. My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

Anne Waldman

#84. I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.

Rachel Kushner

#85. I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

Bharati Mukherjee