There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature. — Christopher Bollen Copy Share Image
I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction. — Jessa Crispin Copy Share Image
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. — Ernest Hemingway Copy Share Image
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University. — David Eagleman Copy Share Image
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes… — Michael Chabon Copy Share Image
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. — Justin Cronin Copy Share Image
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives… — Anatole Broyard Copy Share Image
“We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby. — John Green Copy Share Image
“Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.” — Tony Kushner Copy Share Image
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility. — Wallace Stevens Copy Share Image
When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed… — Marilynne Robinson Copy Share Image
“The American's literature is all about being hot and sexy, inspiring a girl and going to bed with her. It focuses on… — M.F. Moonzajer Copy Share Image
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the… — James Wolcott Copy Share Image
If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and… — Jane Smiley Copy Share Image
In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after… — Natasha Trethewey Copy Share Image
I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James… — James Lee Burke Copy Share Image
I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American… — Roxane Gay Copy Share Image
“You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will: you just hold… — Harper Lee Copy Share Image
“American literature has, since the time of the Puritans, featured the jeremiad as a prolonged complaint, a prophet's indictment of his society… — Michelle M. Tokarczyk Copy Share Image
American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The… — Burton Rascoe Copy Share Image
The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style;… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
“Twas noontide of summer, And mid-time of night; And stars, in their orbits, Shone pale, thro' the light Of the brighter, cold… — Edgar Allan Poe Copy Share Image
Does people not asking me about Asian American literature mean they don't see it as its own literary tradition? I certainly believe… — Hanya Yanagihara Copy Share Image
The main reason I decided to study Latin American literature was because I'd gotten somewhat bored by the American fiction I was… — Adam Morris Copy Share Image
“When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext… — Ta-Nehisi Coates Copy Share Image
“Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space… — William Least Heat-Moon Copy Share Image
“The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters… — James A. Michener Copy Share Image
We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must… — John Green Copy Share Image
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens… — Kiese Laymon Copy Share Image
“Our orthodox friends need not be told that all merit in this world is comparative; and once for all, we desire to… — James Fenimore Cooper Copy Share Image
[John Adams's] vividly descriptive prose is supremely quotable. Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts,… — Gordon S. Wood Copy Share Image
If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can… — Ishmael Reed Copy Share Image
I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I… — Per Petterson Copy Share Image
American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired… — Christopher Dawson Copy Share Image
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who… — Jonathan Frakes Copy Share Image
![“[John Adams's] vividly descriptive prose is supremely quotable. Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature.” quote by Gordon S. Wood](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/52f/gordon-s-wood-13199_ambition_john-adams-s-vividly-descriptive-prose-i_1856135.jpg)
