American Author Quotes

The view from the window, particularly if you enjoy neon, is extraordinary.

Souls bound together can't be forever torn apart by distance and neither by death.

We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.' Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. 'Yolochka, you don't know how love is yet.'

You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.

Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage
When there's more sick ones than well ones, by golly the sick ones will lock the well ones up.

All my life, I knew, all my life I would be haunted by words from Shakespeare.

I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.

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

Propaganda is a weapon that the Confederacy wields best, and wields heaviest. It is their hammer. And when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

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,

The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.

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

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.

Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin',
And the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich,
And your ma is good lookin';
So hush, little baby,
Don' yo' cry.

My love for you won't stop with my leaving. Come an evening over the years, when you step outside your door and hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods, that'll be me, thinking of you, whispering your name, and loving you.

There's no sense to being Irish unless you know the world's going to break your heart.

People are all the same. We need a personal reason to get our asses off the couch.

Olen Steinhauer
Olen Steinhauer
To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt…Her publishers are not women.

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

To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.

Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.

Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward
You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.

Amelia Gray
Amelia Gray
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
Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.