Steve Erickson

If you're a smart writer, you listen.

— Steve Erickson

To the extent that I've ever understood postmodernism - and I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I'm not…

— Steve Erickson

I have members of my immediate family, and my wife's immediate family, who voted for Donald Trump, and now there's this gulf…

— Steve Erickson

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and…

— Steve Erickson

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

— Steve Erickson

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing…

— Steve Erickson

“Everyone, she says, is his own age of meaning.”

— Steve Erickson

“When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the…

— Steve Erickson

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

— Steve Erickson

Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it…

— Steve Erickson

“The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to…

— Steve Erickson

While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that…

— Steve Erickson

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

— Steve Erickson

“The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates…

— Steve Erickson

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war…

— Steve Erickson

In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what…

— Steve Erickson

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

— Steve Erickson

“But of course the Western changed along with America’s view of itself, from some sort of heroic country, where everybody’s free, to…

— Steve Erickson

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

— Steve Erickson

“I got out late winter. I was off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which is not bad calculations. I made…

— Steve Erickson

Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like…

— Steve Erickson

“Since I've never had a dream,' she begins, 'one night I woke and went looking for one.”

— Steve Erickson

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

— Steve Erickson

These days in particular it seems not only unavoidable but even irresponsible to not acknowledge politics in some way.

— Steve Erickson

“That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know…

— Steve Erickson