- Dozens
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- Nov 07, 2020
American Writers Quotes
What shaped some of America's best-known literary voices.
Several of these quotes point to a shared background in newspapers before fiction, and to family as a recurring subject worth returning to. For more reflections tied to this country's identity, see our America quotes.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Nobody
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.
- Busy
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Enough
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Country
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- Nov 07, 2020
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
- Language
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Black
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Intellectual
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020