American Writer Quotes - Page 2

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

  Diane Ackerman

  Play, Brain, Way

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• Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

  Toni Morrison

  Latin, Writing, Black

  Newsweek Interview, March 30, 1981.

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• Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

  Donald Barthelme

  War, World, Formal

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• 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

  Christmas, Xmas, Holiday

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• The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Country, War, Believe

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• 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

  People, Intellectual, Generations

  8 Copy quote

• Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

  Toni Morrison

  Native American, Enjoy, Native

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• 'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

  Mark Helprin

  Party, Garden, Example

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• 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

  Kings, Queens, Native American

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

  Don DeLillo

  Reality, Bedtime, Dangerous

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.46, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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

  Jackie Chan

  Directors, Film, American Film

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• 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

  Writing, Native American, Ironic

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

  Rex Stout

  Book, Writing, Two

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• No one writes a story like Lydia Davis. In the years since she began publishing her lyrical, extremely short fiction, she has quietly become one of the most impactful influences on American writers, even if they don't know it. That's largely because she makes economy seem so easy. You could read several of her stories into a friend's voicemail box before you were cut off (and you should). You could fit one of her stories in this column. Some you could write on your palm.

  Jonathan Messinger

  Writing, Cutting, Years

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• American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

  Grant Morrison

  Dog, Powerful, Writing

  "The Super Psyche of Comic Book Shaman Grant Morrison". Interview with Gavin Edwards, www.playboy.com. April 18, 2012.

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• It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often.... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.

  H. L. Mencken

  New York, Years, California

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• 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

  Country, Travel, Writing

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• The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'

  Anna Quindlen

  Basketball, Girl, Sports

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• The culturally specific, in particular, the American porch play that American writers have cherished and loved for many years in terms of their new writing, has seemed to have very little relevance to a much more fast-flowing, abstract, experimental drama that has been emerging in [the UK]. The porch play, not to mention that thing of, Oops, I wasn't loved enough by my father, somehow didn't have the relevance in this country.

  Stephen Daldry

  Country, Father, Drama

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• 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

  Europe, England, World

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

  Anne Rice

  Country, Doubt, European Countries

  "A Fan's Interview with Anne Rice". Penguin Random House Inerview, www.randomhouse.com.

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• I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handily revolutionized the political, artistic and historical discourses about America. He created his particular and original language.

  Raoul Peck

  Thinking, America, Political

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

  Raoul Peck

  Class, Identity, World

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• Few [books] get translated and the ones that do have trouble making it into the mainstream. It's more likely that Americans will discover another culture through an American writer rather read a writer from that culture.

  Laila Lalami

  Book, Culture, Trouble

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.

  Katie Kitamura

  Book, Ambitious, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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