Top 35 American Literature Quotes

I think if German literature could survive the ’40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

People don’t realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I’ve known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

I’ve immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I’m an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.’ To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester’s works and the little urn that contains my mother’s ashes.

If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play ‘The Crucible’ analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature – I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.

I don’t aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

I’m an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, ‘Lonesome Dove,’ Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad’s an English professor. After a year there, I was like, ‘Jesus. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be in the library.’ So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic – ‘Moby-Dick’ is just about the best book in the world – and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it’s beginning to happen.

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual’s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.

Since ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.

When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.

I’m using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I’m an American poet.

American literature has always been immigrant.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway’s influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

Some people might be surprised that ‘Rambo’s creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I’m writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.