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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.

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

Quotes by William Nicholson

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

Quotes by Toni Morrison

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...

Quotes by Sherman Alexie

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

Quotes by Robert Littell

Affection Quotes

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.

Quotes by Pankaj Mishra

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.

Quotes by Nelson Algren

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

Quotes by Mark Haddon

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...

Quotes by Marilynne Robinson

Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

Quotes by John Gould

Age Quotes

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.'

Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

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...

Quotes by Camille Paglia

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other...

Quotes by Avi

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.

Quotes by Alden Nowlan

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Frequently Asked Questions

What theme comes up most often among these American writers quotes?
Family is mentioned directly as a subject many American writers return to, alongside a shared background in journalism before turning to fiction.
Do Native American writers get mentioned specifically?
Yes, one quote notes that some Native American writers actually enjoy being described that way, pushing back on any assumption that the label feels limiting.
Is there a quote critical of American writers or the culture around them?
Yes, one argues that the middle class's obsession with personal comfort has been pushed onto writers and playwrights so heavily that it cuts off other subject matter. It's a more pointed critique than the others in this set.
Did many well-known American writers start in newspapers?
According to one quote here, yes, describing great American writers as having all come up as newspaper people first. For more on shared national identity in writing, see our America quotes.
Are these quotes mostly about fiction writers specifically?
The quotes reference writers broadly, including playwrights and journalists, rather than sticking to novelists alone. For gentler themes running through the same tradition, browse our Affection quotes.

There's also a pointed note here about how Native American writers regard that specific label, which is worth reading closely. For softer themes running through the same body of work, browse our Affection quotes.