Great American Novel Quotes

#1. The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

W. Somerset Maugham

#2. I got the feeling: It's time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.

John Fusco

#3. 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

#4. I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

Natalie Goldberg

#5. I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

Tony D'Souza

#6. Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

Jasmine Cresswell

#7. In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

Tom Peters

#8. I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.

James A. Michener

#9. There is no Great American Novel," she said absently. "This nation is too big and too diverse to produce only one great book. We've got lots of them and there will be more written in the future. Art doesn't stand still.

Jayne Ann Krentz

#10. It's Fitzgerald's thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.

Maureen Corrigan

#11. I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Rachel Kushner

#12. You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

Theodore Sturgeon

#13. Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

Theodore Dreiser

#14. Everything about Jocelyn had been ordinary. A Norman Rockwell painting of mom, dad, one boy, one girl. Scott was her wild storm, her great American novel, her epic story. Every extraordinary moment she experienced was because of him.

Jessica Shook

#15. She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long.

Clyde Brion Davis

#16. I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.

Dr. Seuss

#17. 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

#18. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

Karl Marlantes

#19. There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless.

Joanne Fluke

#20. I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed.

Susan Choi

#21. When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#22. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Hal Holbrook

#23. People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.

Isabel Allende

#24. 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

#25. I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

Dorothy Garlock

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

Anne Waldman

#27. It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art.

Clyde Brion Davis

#28. For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do.

P.J. Parker

#29. Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

Scott Turow

#30. I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

Tom T. Hall

#31. Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.

Sam Lipsyte

#32. 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