104 American Writer Quotes

Following is our list of american writer quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about american author.

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Famous American Writer Quotes

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman. — Boris Pasternak

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

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men. — Alexander Graham Bell

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps. — Elizabeth George

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. — James Baldwin

The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns. - Wole Soyinka

The writer is the visionary of his people... He anticipates, he warns. — Wole Soyinka

Show me a writer, any writer, who hasn't suffered and I'll show you someone who writes in pastels as opposed to primary colors. — Rita Mae Brown

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. — Thomas Mann

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer. — Carson Mccullers

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham . — George Orwell

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. — Frank Dane

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. — Raymond Carver

Easy reading is damn hard writing. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Short American Writer Quotes

  • A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind. — Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly. — Julian Barnes
  • All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac. — Saul Bellow
  • A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. — Karl Kraus

American Writer Image Quotes

American writer quote As a writer you ask yourself to dream while aware.
As a writer you ask yourself to dream while aware.

What Is An American Quotes

The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it? — H. G. Wells

Fighters find it hard to give up doing what they do best - fighting for a living. — Evander Holyfield

Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians. — Sarah Zettel

American writer quote If you wish to be a writer, write.
If you wish to be a writer, write.

What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies. — Fareed Zakaria

Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. — Steve Busby

What an exciting super-tomorrow it will be! Americans are today making the greatest scientific developments in our history. That is a promise of new levels of employment, industrial activity and human happiness. — Clarence Francis

American writer quote A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity

Education is not the means of showing people how to get what they want. Education is an exercise by means of which enough men, it is hoped, will learn to want what is worth having. — Ronald Reagan

As you know, I'm an immigrant. I came over here as an immigrant, and what gave me the opportunities, what made me to be here today, is the open arms of Americans. I have been received. I have been adopted by America. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

What Americans don't want to admit ... is that not only is there not a contradiction between state regulation and freedom, but in order for us to actually be free in our social interactions, there must be an extremely elaborated network of health, law, institutions, moral rules and so on. — Slavoj Žižek

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier? — Douglas MacArthur

American Author Quotes

The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. — Samuel Adams

For an American to be patriotic is to be loyal to the principles of our Constitution, and the First Amendment. The truth is that the policies of the government is sometimes in conflict with that. In our country, patriotism should not be defined as obedience to an authority. — Daniel Ellsberg

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? — William O. Douglas

American writer quote Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.
Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.

The American Medical Association says the humane way is to let people starve and thirst to death. If you did that to an animal, youd be put in jail immediately ... In the face of such insanity masquerading as authority, who wouldnt be strident? — Jack Kevorkian

It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Iranian leaders describe the American government exactly the way American analysts describe the Iranian one, as an opaque, factionalized system with competing power centers, over which the president exercises very limited authority. — Ali Khamenei

American writer quote I'm a writer. Therefore. I am not sane.
I'm a writer. Therefore. I am not sane.

By ensuring that no one in government has too much power, the Constitution helps protect ordinary Americans every day against abuse of power by those in authority. — John Roberts

I think Americans still can't help but respond to the natural authority of this voice. Deep down they long to be told what to do by a British accent. That's why so many infomercials have British people. — Sayings

All Americans mourn the passing of the author of the Declaration of Independence, George Jefferson. — Andy Borowitz

Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority. — Ayn Rand

American Literature Quotes

While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction — Nicholas D. Kristof

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. — Leslie Marmon Silko

All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage. — Harold Pinter

American writer quote What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are al
What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests.

The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery. — Ernie Pyle

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers. — Diane Wakoski

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. — Tony Kushner

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead. — Sinclair Lewis

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with. — Anna Quindlen

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University. — David Eagleman

American Poetry Quotes

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. — Countee Cullen

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily — Gwendolyn B. Bennett

I want to get rid of the Indian problem. [...] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question and no Indian Department. — Duncan Campbell Scott

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this. — Diane Wakoski

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot

American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare — Muriel Rukeyser

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song. — Phil Ochs

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry. — Philip Levine

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet. — Diane Wakoski

Probably the high-watermark of [Bob] Dylan's career came after he plugged in his guitar ("Judas!" one fan shouted during a concert) and exploded American poetry, combining Beat aesthetics, psychedelic imagery, collage techniques. — Jay Michaelson

People Writing About American Writer

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Read quotes by Richard Bach

Richard Bach
quotes on love, family and life

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Read quotes by Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak
quotes on life, love and death

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Read quotes by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway
quotes on love, writing and war

812 11022
Read quotes by Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell
quotes on telephone

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Read quotes by Elizabeth George

Elizabeth George
quotes on education, freedom and love

84 152
Read quotes by Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett
quotes on death, love and freedom

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More American Writer Quotes

In 1899, when American writer Nellie Bly set out on her record-breaking journey around the world in seventy-two days, she carried British gold coins and Bank of England notes with her. It was possible to circumnavigate the globe and use one form of money everywhere Nellie went. — Saifedean Ammous

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure. — Julia Alvarez

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters. — William Saroyan

Every time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous. They don't make sense. — Jackie Chan

For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. — Virginia Hamilton

The English and Americans dislike only some Irish--the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers--the ones that think. — Brendan Behan

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form. — Chester Himes

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. — John Cheever

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

As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and triumphed matters. For every story that belongs to you, in time, belongs to America. — Andrew Lam

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with. — Jo Nesbo

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

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave. — Anatole Broyard

We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there. — Norman Lear

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost. — Bharati Mukherjee

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

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader. — Michael Chabon

Fantasy doesn't have to be fantastic. American writers in particular find this much harder to grasp. You need to have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds. The cute dragon that sits on your shoulder also craps all down your back, but this makes it more interesting because it gives it an added dimension. — Terry Pratchett

A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it. — Charles Dudley Warner

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober. — James Thurber

I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten. — Francis Ford Coppola

I do feel it's crucial that women's opinions be taken equally with men's. But still'I have not been accepted by the American white feminist writers and activists, and frankly I don't care to be, so I am a womanist. I am feisty and I am given to womanish behavior. — Kola Boof

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook. — John Lukacs

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. — Carson Mccullers

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

Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ. — Kurt Vonnegut

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into. — Jonathan Frakes

African American writers and artists, by the very nature of what they do, will actually enhance or bring together people in a way that might be very, very healthy. — Jerry Pinkney

I'm Mexican-American, but for a long time I was pushed out of any references to Mexican-American writers. It was easier to come out as a gay man than it was to come out as a Mexican-American. — John Rechy

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel. — Anne Waldman

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really. — Richard Ayoade

The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination. — Thylias Moss

To an American writer, I should think it must be a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the newspapers. — Frances Trollope

Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor. — Ha-Joon Chang

The best writing advice I had was [in] ‘Heinlein’s Rules for Writers’ by (American science fiction author) Robert A. Heinlein. His first rule is that you must write, and I was already doing that, but his second rule is, ‘You must finish what you write,’ and that had a big impact on me. — George R. R. Martin

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers. — Kiran Desai

I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans — Irwin Shaw

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed. — Manuel Puig

I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature. — James Lee Burke

I know a lot of writers who would much rather be writing the Great American Novel, but they've got bills to pay and alimony, and so they take a job at a less-than-reputable paper. You know, you do what you gotta do. — Eric Stoltz

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane. — Margaret Anderson

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes. — Alden Nowlan

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War. — Adam Hochschild

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