Top 100 Quotes About American Literature
#1. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#2. Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
James L. Brooks
#3. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In
Mat Johnson
#4. I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.
David Eddings
#5. 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
#6. American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
Christopher Dawson
#7. I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.
E.L. Doctorow
#8. I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.
Joshua Cohen
#9. It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.
Arthur Phillips
#10. Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.
Alfred Kazin
#11. I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
#12. I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.
Sherman Alexie
#13. Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.
Sam Neill
#14. As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
David Eagleman
#15. First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.
Kiese Laymon
#16. There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.
Christopher Bollen
#17. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#18. I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.
Carolyn See
#19. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#20. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#21. Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.
David Morrell
#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. Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#24. All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.
John Green
#25. 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
#26. You might like that one. But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly ( ... )
Matthew Quick
#27. Esther loses her virginity, hemorrhages during the process, and almost bleeds to death - like Catherine in A Farewell to Arms - and I do wonder why women are always hemorrhaging in American literature.
Matthew Quick
#28. The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.
Tayari Jones
#29. Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
#31. 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
#32. There is nothing political about American literature.
Laura Bush
#33. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.
Haruki Murakami
#34. What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
James Wolcott
#35. Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
Terry Teachout
#36. We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.
John Green
#37. 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
#38. I do wonder why women are always hemorrhaging in American literature.
-Pat Peoples
Matthew Quick
#39. I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.
Jessa Crispin
#40. I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.
Miguel Syjuco
#41. 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
#42. If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
Jane Smiley
#43. The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
James Dickey
#44. 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
#45. I am the penny whistle of American literature.
Nelson Algren
#46. I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.
Azar Nafisi
#47. I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.
Mark Helprin
#48. I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.
Sinclair Lewis
#50. I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.
Jessa Crispin
#51. One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
Justin Cronin
#52. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
#53. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway,
#54. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#55. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#57. Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.
Tony Kushner
#58. 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
#60. I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.
Michael Gold
#61. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#63. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#64. Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed...
Ward Just
#65. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
Valerie Wilson Wesley
#66. 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
#68. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.
Jean Toomer
#69. Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time.
Donald Hays
#70. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
#71. If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
Sven Birkerts
#72. like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.
James Hannaham
#73. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
Richard Dawkins
#74. Life on
Life on the reservation
Life on the reservation is dirty
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy dogs.
(Dena Colhoff, student)
Timothy P. McLaughlin
#75. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#76. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Michael Eric Dyson
#77. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.
Soledad O'Brien
#78. Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality.
Mildred D. Taylor
#79. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
Nigel Hamilton
#80. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Helen Vendler
#82. Christians are the salt of the earth ... Nothing grows where they've been.
Donald Hays
#83. To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
Sinclair Lewis
#84. If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.
Richard Carmona
#85. I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
Janet Fitch
#86. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.
Tony Kushner
#87. The Bohemian who tires of life, who gives up by retirement into insamity or suicide, is not necessarily one who had failed in what he wants to express.
Emily Hahn
#88. This book is dedicated to every woman who has ever felt self-conscious about her size. Outer beauty comes in all sizes, shapes, heights, ages, and colors. And inner beauty will always shine through, no matter what the packaging.
Raynetta Manees
#89. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
Peter Abrahams
#90. By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.
John Leo
#91. We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.
Don DeLillo
#92. Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out ...
Ben Marcus
#93. She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
Marcel Proust
#94. Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.
Terri Windling
#95. 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
#96. Nat played away and never minded anyone, while his eyes shone, his cheeks reddened, and his thin fingers flew, as he hugged the old fiddle and made it speak to all their hearts the language that he loved.
Louisa May Alcott
#97. I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let's pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners.
David B. Lentz
#98. She believed being so free with her sexuality was empowering, but I wouldn't say taking home a douchebag who would laugh about the encounter with his friend later is a step forward in the feminist movement.-Lily
Teresa Lo
#99. Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave.
William H Gass
#100. They speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement ...
Isabel Wilkerson
