American Literature Quotes

I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

I bought a book of Mark Twain quotes. That's about my speed. I'll read a couple quotes and put it down.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

I hated Hemingway. I liked Faulkner but he was a bore.

One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.

Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

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.'

I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

People don't realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I've known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.

The first thing I did on television was a PBS thing where I played a priest. It was a Walt Whitman or Carl Sandburg story - I can't quite remember - but I was a turn-of-the-20th-century priest kind of guy. Never saw it; don't know if I was any good or not.

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.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

Edgar Allan Poe is amazing because he was so dark. He's from Baltimore and so cynical that you can feel it when you're reading, it feels so honest.

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

[James] Baldwin was a celebrity. A TV show like Kenneth Clark could put him aside of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He was, at least, one of the three most important spokesmen of the movement and of the black community.

I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years.