American Writers Quotes

#1. 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

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

Gore Vidal

#3. 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

#4. It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice.

Paul Harris

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

Scott Turow

#6. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.

Frederick Lenz

#7. When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.

Daniel Kehlmann

#8. For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Robert Littell

#9. The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.

Sam Shepard

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

Toni Morrison

#14. Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.

Pat Conroy

#15. The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.

Pankaj Mishra

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

Laurie Anderson

#17. The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.

Nelson Algren

#18. I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.

Thomas H. Cook

#19. What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.

Camille Paglia

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. I'm Mexican-American, but for a long time I was pushed out of any references to Mexican-American writers. It was easier to come out as a gay man than it was to come out as a Mexican-American.

John Rechy

#23. For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

Gore Vidal

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

Don DeLillo

#25. There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.

William Nicholson

#26. 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

#27. American writers are too often only witnesses, tourists, to most human suffering and pleasure.

Ira Sadoff

#28. Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

John Gould

#29. It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.

Robertson Davies

#30. Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

Salman Rushdie

#31. It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

Jesmyn Ward

#32. 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

#33. American writers, at least those of us who are fortunate enough to support ourselves in the field, are by and large a lucky lot.

Bryan Burrough

#34. Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

James Thurber

#35. Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

Pankaj Mishra

#36. Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks.

Pat Conroy

#37. 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

#38. I wanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, and artistic judgments saved for African American writers.

Toni Morrison

#39. 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

#40. I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Anne Rice

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

Jackie Chan

#43. 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

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

Kiran Desai

#45. When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

Marilynne Robinson

#46. 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

#47. There's something with the physical size of America ... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

Mark Haddon

#48. American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out.

D.T. Max

#49. Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.

Donald Barthelme

#50. I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.

Daniel Alarcon

#51. When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

Doris Lessing

#52. The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

William March

#53. I think there's a growing courage among the younger generation of American writers. Because of the more superficial treatment of characters taking place in cinema, they have had to deal with that by digging deeper into who these people are.

Mohsin Hamid

#54. 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

#55. 'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.

Terrence McNally

#56. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#57. Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

Manuel Puig

#58. It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Anatole Broyard

#59. There's more emphasis on art and culture in Europe than there is in the United States and I think that a lot of American directors and writers are just trying to copy other American horror films, they don't pick up much in the way that European filmmakers do.

Wes Craven

#60. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO

Chuck Palahniuk

#61. Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Siri Hustvedt

#62. My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

Jo Nesbo

#63. I know a lot of writers who would much rather be writing the Great American Novel, but they've got bills to pay and alimony, and so they take a job at a less-than-reputable paper. You know, you do what you gotta do.

Eric Stoltz

#64. I do feel it's crucial that women's opinions be taken equally with men's. But still'I have not been accepted by the American white feminist writers and activists, and frankly I don't care to be, so I am a womanist. I am feisty and I am given to womanish behavior.

Kola Boof

#65. My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

Antonya Nelson

#66. 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

#67. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.

Louise Gluck

#68. I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson.

Jo Nesbo

#69. In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them.

Pat Conroy

#70. Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

Rachel Bloom

#71. Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.

Gene Luen Yang

#72. 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

#73. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

Eudora Welty

#74. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

James A. Michener

#75. I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.

Teju Cole

#76. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.

William H Gass

#77. There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I'm neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I'm uneasily somewhere in the middle.

Pankaj Mishra

#78. Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

Cybill Shepherd

#79. I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

Alice Walker

#80. It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you've sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.

Steven Pressfield

#81. 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

#82. Teachers have been heroes to me, as well as artists and writers, and I'm honored to be among their ranks. There is always a lot of grousing about the academy. I suppose it comes from our all-American anti-authoritarianism.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#83. My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

Ishmael Reed

#84. He Said...

Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love.

Anne Spencer

#85. But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

Langston Hughes

#86. One survey of American newspapers found that the number of articles written by papers' own writers increased from 25 percent to 45 percent between the 1820s and 1850s.

Tom Standage

#87. I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

Jonathan Frakes

#88. American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

Chester Himes

#89. I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

Ishmael Reed

#90. Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three minutes a day reading a book. At this moment, you and I are engaged in an essentially antiquated interaction. Welcome, fellow Neanderthal!

Dick Meyer

#91. We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.

Margaret Whiting

#92. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Chris Abani

#93. Some major American publishing houses still seek work by foreign writers.

Stephen Kinzer

#94. I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

Jay Parini

#95. Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers.

Jonathan Yardley

#96. 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

#97. You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

Sherman Alexie

#98. The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

James Dickey

#99. 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

#100. I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

Diane Wakoski