Top 100 Steve Erickson Quotes
#1. I'm reading Our Ecstatic Days, by Steve Erickson. It's an extraordinary journey and the most exciting thing I've found since The Master and Margarita, which I've read about 20 times. I like being taken away somewhere by a book.
Sienna Guillory
#2. As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.
Steve Erickson
#3. Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.
Steve Erickson
#4. The ritual of families watching TV together passed into antiquity around the time I was my son's age; that was when households tended to have a single television and when the choices of what to watch were manageable.
Steve Erickson
#5. Even if you haven't seen 'The Seventh Seal,' you've seen it. The influence is so vast and insidious, every image of a black-robed, white-faced Death is a rip or parody of 'The Seventh Seal.'
Steve Erickson
#6. Since I've never had a dream,' she begins, 'one night I woke and went looking for one.
Steve Erickson
#7. The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.
Steve Erickson
#8. The Doors formed on the beaches of Los Angeles, in what you might imagine is the tradition of local rock bands since the Beach Boys.
Steve Erickson
#9. 1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more.
Steve Erickson
#10. For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.
Steve Erickson
#11. Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts act themselves senseless in 'August: Osage County,' and by the time they're finished, they've acted their movie senseless, too.
Steve Erickson
#12. Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result.
Steve Erickson
#13. Redford always has been a cool presence both before and behind the camera. His best movie as a filmmaker, 1994's 'Quiz Show,' exhibits a classicism verging on self-repression, and the social indignation in many of his films engages more than moves you.
Steve Erickson
#14. Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.
Steve Erickson
#16. The first books I remember having an impact on me when I was a kid were L. Frank Baum's 'Oz' books, which were much stranger than the movie: at once rather whimsical and really dark.
Steve Erickson
#17. Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy?
Steve Erickson
#18. For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
Steve Erickson
#19. Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.
Steve Erickson
#20. The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood's view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade's view of everything else.
Steve Erickson
#21. Being the family's literate one, my wife doesn't watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she'll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart.
Steve Erickson
#22. In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
Steve Erickson
#23. The '80s convergence of comics' new adult sensibility with the movies' advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' became phenomena.
Steve Erickson
#24. I don't know how many modern families watch 'Modern Family,' but then one of the points of 'Modern Family' is that it's hard to tell what a modern family is anymore, let alone what it does.
Steve Erickson
#25. A modern fascination with the fantastic seems to come along every couple of generations, usually at a point when we're future saturated.
Steve Erickson
#26. All of Wes Anderson's films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all.
Steve Erickson
#27. In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
Steve Erickson
#28. In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.
Steve Erickson
#29. Notwithstanding the likes of 'All the President's Men' in the 1970s or HBO's recent 'The Newsroom,' film and TV have always loved to hate the press.
Steve Erickson
#30. In retrospect, 'Pulp Fiction' isn't just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.
Steve Erickson
#31. He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can't see it anymore, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward.
Steve Erickson
#32. To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.
Steve Erickson
#33. You're in the lights and he thinks you're exposed, he's in the dark and he thinks he's hidden. But he's not hidden, he's dead, and you're not exposed, you're alive.
Steve Erickson
#34. When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.
Steve Erickson
#35. The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."
Steve Erickson
#36. 'Homeland' is necessarily open-ended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving as little as possible, with a story's usual need for resolution replaced by an unrelenting urgency that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure.
Steve Erickson
#37. If 'Fargo' is about anything, it's American madness.
Steve Erickson
#38. That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.
Steve Erickson
#39. Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.
Steve Erickson
#40. This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.
Steve Erickson
#41. Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.
Steve Erickson
#42. Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.
Steve Erickson
#43. You keep looking around for who's in fucking charge, and there's just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell's angry on Fifth Avenue, that's what I want to know.
Steve Erickson
#44. When L.A.'s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
Steve Erickson
#45. Americans disagree about America because the most common consensus as to what America is or has ever been or ever was meant to be eludes us, and it eludes us because we want it to.
Steve Erickson
#46. Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers.
Steve Erickson
#47. Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.
Steve Erickson
#48. Hopefully it doesn't come as too much of a shock that artists we love watching or listening to for an hour or two aren't always people with whom we otherwise would want to spend 20 minutes.
Steve Erickson
#49. Beautiful women get in Hollywood's door quickest and then are shut out when their beauty no longer measures up to whatever it is that Hollywood or audiences decide is beautiful enough; once they're inside, their choices are limited by the same beauty that won them their entree.
Steve Erickson
#50. Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity.
Steve Erickson
#51. Walter Cronkite was the last newsman everyone trusted in the same way that the Beatles were the last music everyone loved and Marilyn was the last star everyone concurred was worthy of the word.
Steve Erickson
#52. Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.
Steve Erickson
#53. Ironically, if only because over the years I've known so many - from college deans to studio executives to European expats - who come to Los Angeles aspiring to nothing other than living in Topanga, I wound up there by accident.
Steve Erickson
#54. I've decided 'Breaking Bad' may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion.
Steve Erickson
#55. Beautiful actors are learning what beautiful actresses like Charlize Theron discovered a while ago - that they get taken more seriously when they trash the same beauty that got them taken seriously to begin with.
Steve Erickson
#56. 'The Company You Keep' is about outgrowing not just the delusions that accompany youth but the harsh certainties driving our lives and then trapping them before the years outpace the velocity of our dreams.
Steve Erickson
#57. Among the gorges and ravines that hang on Los Angeles's shoulders like a necklace, Topanga - nestled in the cleavage of the Santa Monica Mountains - is the most singular of ornaments.
Steve Erickson
#58. I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.
Steve Erickson
#59. In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.
Steve Erickson
#60. Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end.
Steve Erickson
#61. I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
Steve Erickson
#62. 'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.
Steve Erickson
#63. I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
Steve Erickson
#64. Inside every TV star is a movie star screaming to get out, and Donna Frenzel, with whom I'm guessing you're not instantly familiar, made George Clooney a movie star once and for all in the first ten minutes of his fifth feature, 1998's 'Out of Sight.'
Steve Erickson
#65. By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book.
Steve Erickson
#66. I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.
Steve Erickson
#67. To an extent, our relationship with the movies is always subjective. Our capacity to be involved says as much about each of us; I've never fathomed why anyone would want to spend four hours in the company of the exceedingly tiresome Scarlett O'Hara.
Steve Erickson
#68. Like all paradises, Topanga is pitched at the tipping point of promise and peril.
Steve Erickson
#69. When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.
Steve Erickson
#70. Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.
Steve Erickson
#71. As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.
Steve Erickson
#72. Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.
Steve Erickson
#73. When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
Steve Erickson
#74. Taking place in some Nordic-looking hinterland where all the seasons are out of whack, 'Game of Thrones' is the most aggressive example since 'Battlestar Galactica' of a genre that's perceived as adolescent aspiring to be fully adult.
Steve Erickson
#75. By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.
Steve Erickson
#76. While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.
Steve Erickson
#77. 'Lincoln' is impressive enough to almost make you forget how much Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the endeavor.
Steve Erickson
#78. Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.
Steve Erickson
#79. Let's say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths.
Steve Erickson
#80. In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.
Steve Erickson
#81. You can't blame movies for embracing spectacle; filmmakers since D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille have loved spectacle, and spectacle is something that movies convey like no other medium, especially in a digital age.
Steve Erickson
#82. I don't know for a fact, but I feel fairly certain that the first person who described a movie as 'character driven' had to have been a producer or studio executive.
Steve Erickson
#83. If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals.
Steve Erickson
#84. Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn't have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that's often nothing but.
Steve Erickson
#85. You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them.
Steve Erickson
#86. I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.
Steve Erickson
#87. I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
Steve Erickson
#88. 'Homeland' was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become.
Steve Erickson
#89. The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.
Steve Erickson
#90. It's not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it.
Steve Erickson
#91. L.A. streets aren't just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city's sensibility.
Steve Erickson
#92. America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?
Steve Erickson
#93. Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.
Steve Erickson
#94. Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the supreme nut jobs in movie history, and of course I mean that in the nicest way.
Steve Erickson
#95. The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are.
Steve Erickson
#96. What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.
Steve Erickson
#97. A street is a story in asphalt - so it's a paradox that the streets are the one place where the movies play fast and loose with continuity, something to which L.A. streets lend themselves as naturally as does the city's psyche.
Steve Erickson
#98. Some distant day, anthropologists will consider as a landmark in humankind's evolution - comparable to the capacity for destroying ourselves by nuclear obliteration - the adolescent gene's newly emergent power to dictate nightly TV viewing.
Steve Erickson
#99. The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.
Steve Erickson
#100. Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.
Steve Erickson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
