American Novelist Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Henry James

Pearl S. Buck

Nathaniel Hawthorne

J. D. Salinger

Sylvia Plath

Toni Morrison

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

As Rose stood by him watching the ease with which he quickly brought order out of chaos, she privately resolved to hunt up her old arithmetic and perfect herself in the four first rules, with a good tug at fractions, before she read any more fairy tales.

Louisa May Alcott

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.

Lloyd Alexander

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

Dorothy Allison

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.

Sherwood Anderson

What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they're relapsing into that old frame of mind that what we're doing is BAD.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.

Paolo Bacigalupi

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

If you want to learn a culture, you have to learn how to like what it likes, rather than go looking for something that you like.

I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boar into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you're fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

My insides still turn over when he looks at me that certain way.