American Fiction Quotes

My teeth ache, my gums hurt, and my cat is tearing me apart, wanting you in every way imaginable. Your body. Your magic. Your fire spirit. Your blood. ~ N.D. Jones

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel. ~ John Hodgman

The problem is Jewish-American fiction that always ends with assimilation back into the community. ~ Joshua Cohen

Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world? ~ Kamila Shamsie

If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest ... she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death. ~ Ned Rorem

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction." ~ Sandra Cisneros

Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can. ~ Gloria Mallette

Rick Bass is one of a dwindling handful of American fiction writers still celebrating the importance of place, the natural world, and the struggle of a few brave souls to live and work respectfully in what's left of our western wilderness ... The Lives of Rocks is his most lyrical and powerful book to date ... a masterwork. ~ Howard Frank Mosher

Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. ~ Jess Row

The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously. ~ George Pelecanos

You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer. ~ Paul Elie

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it. ~ Gary Shteyngart

We stared at each other in silence until she looked away. I won. I always won, because I had my daddy's eyes and she could only stare for so long, without looking away. I had my own ways of getting to Baby-Sweet. ~ Jaguar Jonez

As for Proust, his contribution has been to create, from an obstinate contemplation of reality, a closed
world that belonged only to him and that indicated his victory over the transitoriness of things and over
death. But he uses absolutely the opposite means. He upholds, above everything, by a deliberate choice, a
careful selection of unique experience, which the writer chooses from the most secret recesses of his past.
Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace in the memory. If the
American novel is the novel of men without memory, the world of Proust is nothing but memory. It is
concerned only with the most difficult and most exacting of memories, the memory that rejects the
dispersion of the actual world and derives, from the trace of a lingering perfume, the secret of a new and
ancient universe. Proust chooses the interior life and, of the interior life, that which is more interior than
life itself in preference to what is forgotten in the world of reality - in other words, the purely mechanical
and blind aspects of the world. But by his rejection of reality he does not deny reality. He does not
commit the error, which would counterbalance the error of American fiction, of suppressing
the mechanical. He unites, on the contrary, into a superior form of unity, the memory of the past and the
immediate sensation, the twisted foot and the happy days of times past. ~ Albert Camus

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days. ~ Albert Brooks

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Language is the thing that exceeds us all, being not merely conduit or message, but a placeless frieze of timeless resonance, a maze of etymology in which its ancient users and misusers whisper to us with dead glottises. ~ Paul West

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called. ~ Walter Kirn

You and that amazing body of yours will be the cause of some too-appreciative witch's death. Maybe two witches." Or a dozen, her fire spirit hissed. ~ N.D. Jones

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction
perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided. ~ H.L. Mencken

Couples swayed and embraced to the beat as the singer's vocals soared above a group of confused teenagers and twenty-something's. ~ Brian Joyce

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance. ~ George Williamson

They say love is blind ... but it isn't. Love is perfect sight. Love is the ability to see a person, I mean really see him-his strengths, his weaknesses, his flaws, all his past triumphs and mistakes-and view that person not as the world says you're supposed to see him, but as you see him-as that special someone you know you will always embrace, body and soul, no matter what anyone else says or thinks
I know I can't tell anyone what I've been through. I know they wouldn't understand. They don't see him the way that I see him. All they know is the legend, the darkness. They don't know the inner beauty, the warmth and the joy more intense than anything I ever thought was possible to experience.
They don't know the truth behind the name.
My angel.
My only.
Lucifer. ~ Marlon Pierre-Antoine

Next time
we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren! ~ Leonard Leventon

That the American police can perjure themselves with the same ease, that they are just as merciless, just as brutal and cunning as their European colleagues, has been proven on more than one occasion. We need only recall the tragedy of the eleventh of November, 1887, known as the Haymarket Riot. No one who is at all familiar with the case can possibly doubt that the Anarchists, judicially murdered in Chicago, died as victims of a lying, bloodthirsty press and of a cruel police conspiracy. Has not Judge Gary himself said: Not because you have caused the Haymarket bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on trial. ~ Emma Goldman

I sometimes wonder whether our churches
living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses
are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial. ~ Mark Galli

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

Angel you may have lucked out this time, but just remember I'm going to be on your ass until I get my revenge. I promise you this will not be the last time you will see me! You're a dead man Medina, maybe not now but soon! - Orlando to Angel under the crumbling furnace in the hotel. ~ Angel Ramon Medina

A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. ~ Claudia Rankine

Agonizing really, how enduring love can be. Even after you have packed it up and put it away, it is still there - always there, yellowing around the edges and begging you to turn its pages again. ~ Tina L. Hook

Do we have a kraken?" Billy asked quickly. "Could we unleash a kraken?" Nereus and Machiavelli turned to look at the young American immortal. "What?" he asked, looking from one to the other. He turned to Machiavelli. "What?"
The Italian's gray eyes blazed a warning.
"We do not have a kraken," Nereus said. "Besides, even if I did have a kraken, they're only about this big." He spread his thumb and forefinger roughly an inch apart. ~ Michael Scott

I want every American to be free to stand up for his rights, even if sometimes he has to sit down for them. ~ John F. Kennedy

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world. ~ Vincent Canby

For years, we in publishing have been hearing from Catholic readers that they really yearn for Catholic fiction. ~ Regina Doman

I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe. ~ Frederik Pohl

Madness is in the mind of the beholder. ~ D'Monic Boris Lee

The dykes versus the fags, but every straight man in the U.S who watched porn wanted to see two women getting off together. Lesbians held a unique place in the intolerant American psyche: it was the men who lay with men who challenged the words of the Holy Bible ~ Jenna Hilary Sinclair

Chaos that closely resembled panic awaited.

Shuttles raced to the presumed safety of the planet below while fighters crisscrossed the perimeter of the station. Platoon-sized formations of frigates and several cruisers formed up and accelerated away. To where the approaching attackers were located?

She didn't give a damn what her mother said in public. This was a bona fide insurrection. ~ G.S. Jennsen

Anything by Kipling ~ Rudyard Kipling

It's not getting any better for the American people. It seems to be getting worse. That's predictable; education is a cycle. Stupidity breeds more stupidity. ~ Bill Maher

For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race. ~ David Berlinski

The prospective colonization of space responds, not to the particular problems of the American nation, or of any other nation, but to those of mankind as a whole ... In an ideal view, such an undertaking by mankind as a whole would tend to divert it from its present preoccupation with international conflict, would tend to channel its energies into the pursuit of a great common purpose. ~ Louis J. Halle

If you let them paddle the boat, you are either going to starve or you are going to drown. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Making all effort resist absorption into American cult of the individual, traditional method entrenched oligarchy so maintain own power: Fracture citizen isolated into different religion, different race, different family. Label as rich cultural diversity. Cleave as unique until each citizen stand alone. Until each vote invested no value. Single citizen celebrated as special-in actual, remaining no power. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

One side of the American psyche wants smaller government, lower taxes, and more choices for individuals, even if those choices increase risk. The other wants a strong social safety net to protect the weakest among us, even if it costs more to minimize risk. ~ Ron Fournier

Ideology is dead..Politics is about barter..you give some, take back a lot more. Its business at the end of the day. - Ravi Nehra ~ Tuhin A. Sinha

I'm shooting a gangbanger, but as a dignified man. That's pretty much what war photography did: seeing images of soldiers in a dignified way. They might have been killers in Vietnam, but I'm seeing another side of them, and looking at images of the the American soldiers, also the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong - I never saw an enemy. ~ Jamel Shabazz

Now that I had run out of steam I realized I was in Ronan's room, at
night. He was standing there in a pair of boxers and nothing else. Gulp. Maybe I
shouldn't be too hasty to throw away this betrothal. Ew. Great, Grazi, why not just drool
all over the boy in his underwear after you pretty much told him you wanted nothing to
do with him? I'm such a freak.
"Um, I'll see you tomorrow." I turned around and left as quickly as I had come in. ~ C.D. Gorri

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Ariana strikes me as the type of girl who is attracted to authenticity. ~ Siobhan Davis