American Author Quotes

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.

Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.

We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with african eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters when what we want is sun.

Neither awake nor in a dark dream are perilous blades just as they seem.

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés
One of the frustrations of having a mind trained to think and consider possibilities was that it couldn't simply be stopped once engaged.

Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within his personality, a short circuit in his identity. The result is his originality, his creativity comes to an end. He becomes the one-book novelist or the one-trilogy writer.

Henry Roth
Henry Roth
Painters are so bitchy. Magritte told Miró that Kandinsky had feet of Klee.
Told to Ned Sherrin

under a soprano sky, a woman sings,
lovely as chandeliers.

Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez
As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me,

Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

Statistics show that you have nothing to worry about.

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

Ralph Fletcher
Ralph Fletcher
There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

James Dickey
James Dickey
Don't you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.

Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage
Sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go,
But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago.

I read, for the first time, of the Carolina Parakeet-a North American parakeet whose green, yellow and reddish-orange plumage appeared vivacious and altogether quite wonderful. As stunning as I found the hawk-chased conures, this bird astounded me even more. That the Carolina Parakeet was extinct simply added to my amazement.

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No.

In this life you sometimes have to choose between pleasing God and pleasing man. - In the long run, it's better to please God - he's more apt to remember.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

You'd scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage;
And if I chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don't view me with a critic's eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in — the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

If the doctors cure
then the sun sees it.
If the doctors kill
then the earth hides it.
The doctors should fear arrogance
more than cardiac arrest.

Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton