American Author Quotes

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.

The big picture is that there is no big picture.
That's why we keep painting it.

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

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.

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
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.

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.

The best hiding spots are not the most hidden; they're merely the least searched.

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
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
Men want a challenge, but they want a challenge they can win.

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

Amelia Gray
Amelia Gray
The moon drowsed between the trees like a great yellow moth.

Hallie Erminie Rives
Hallie Erminie Rives
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.

People often choose to misunderstand if it makes life more interesting.

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

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

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.

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.