American Writer Quotes

I am one of maybe three people in the world who knows anything about Robert W. Chambers.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

There's a book called 'Where The Wild Things Are,' by American writer Maurice Sendak... it really is the most sublime book. It's a picture book, but it works at so many levels, and it's fantastic.

Mark Twain is a voice of truth and a voice of equality and a voice of tolerance. Which means he is a voice of love.

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

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.

I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.

Flannery O'Connor is my creative hero. I think she's the greatest American writer. Her book, 'Mystery and Manners,' is my creative bible.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.

I'm an African-American writer, I'm a lazy writer, I'm a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I'm a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.

I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

The wonderful thing about being an American writer is you've got this vastness to draw from.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

George Saunders is a complete genius.