Top 60 Great American Quotes

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

I’ve got a collection of songs that I’ve had, I keep adding to and they’re all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I’ve done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.

A Trump presidency will turn the economy around and restore the great American tradition of giving each new generation hope for brighter opportunities than those of the generation that came before.

There are probably some readers who don’t want a great American writer to acknowledge that cleaning out the bottom drawer of the refrigerator has ever crossed their mind.

When I was young, I kept trying to read ‘Moby-Dick’, and I couldn’t get that far into it. And I kept thinking, ‘Well, man, if I can’t read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.’ And this bothered me a great deal.

My uncle Lionel ended up being a bug guy at 20th Century Fox, which my father had been – and, of course, my cousin Randy – you know, one of the great American songwriters. It was a storied family and, in many ways, very tough to emerge from.

When reflecting upon it today, that the Pearl Harbor attack should have succeeded in achieving surprise seems a blessing from Heaven. It was clear that a great American fleet had been concentrated in Pearl Harbor, and we supposed that the state of alert would be very high.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it’s really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.

The richness of America is that we are diverse. We’re not Sweden. We’re not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don’t confront the real racial realities that still persist.

Great American leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worshipped God just as our Founding Fathers did. We must never forget this important aspect of our heritage or use it as a political bargaining chip.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

As an investor, I’m always looking for the next great American company. Who will create tomorrow’s Twitter, Facebook, or Google?

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

One of our books has been made into a musical, ‘The Great American Mousical,’ which I directed at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. And another, ‘Simeon’s Gift,’ has been adapted for a symphony orchestra and five performers. I’m also a very proud member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

‘Treme’ begins after Hurricane Katrina, and it’s a year-by-year account of how everyday people there put their lives back together. It’s sort of a testament to, or an argument for why, a great American city like New Orleans needs to be saved and preserved.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.

Norman Rockwell – even though we think of him as a great American artist, in a lot of museums he has not garnered that kind of attention. And it’s this kind of accessibility that we’re trying to bring – not looking down on any art.

You don’t sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don’t do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town – from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford – America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.

When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn’t have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work – oh, God.

It has long been a dream of mine that this important story one day would be told on the great American stage of Broadway. In fact, I’ve dedicated much of the latter half of my life to ensuring the story of the internment is known.

My initial training was on the keyboard – mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.

If proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’

For me, the essence of the great American Dream is spiritual. I believe that our Constitution is inspired and that it is based on principles that are timeless and universal. This is the reason why 95% of all written constitutions throughout the world are modeled after our Constitution.

For many years, I’ve always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn’t believe he was writing the songs he was writing.

Before I started on ‘Borgen’, people introduced me to some great American box-sets to convince me that TV could be good. I now watch them all the time. Amy Poehler is very funny in ‘Parks and Recreation’ and ‘In Treatment,’ with Gabriel Byrne, is also really good.

The Disney tradition – number one, it’s a great American classic tradition – and it’s something where you don’t want to go over certain lines. You want to poke fun, but you don’t want to poke fun in a way that’s hurtful.

Old Glory represents our great American military and their sacrifices to ensure our freedom. This isn’t a political issue. This is about Patriotism, and we need more of it.

I think ‘Gatsby’ is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they’ve even opened it, treat it with a ‘been there, done that’ attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I’d missed.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

I got the feeling: It’s time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.

The great American game should be an unrelenting war of nerves.

The great American work ethic has not been lost, but it has been eroded by years of dumb government policies that Mr. Trump and Congress can correct.

Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.

We all tell our own stories the way we live our lives. My story is: Life is too short to not believe in fresh voices. I don’t have Hollywood stars. I have great American artists.

In 2009, South Carolina was blessed to welcome a great American company that chose to stay in our country to continue to do business. That company was Boeing.

I didn’t have the great American novel burning inside me, but I felt I could try my hand at popular fiction.

I’m not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

Petraeus is the finest general I have ever worked for; Holly Petraeus is a great American hero.

We can only solve our biggest problems if we come together and embrace the freedoms that our Founding Fathers established right here in Philadelphia, which permitted our ancestors to create the great American exceptionalism that all of us now enjoy.

P.C. Richard and Son has a wonderful heritage and is part of the great American storybook.

I think John Coltrane is one of the great American heroes, like Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson.

She was in a difficult position being the widow of a great American hero, a role that carried high expectations but she did a credible job of continuing Dr King’s dream especially in the face of a changing and often hostile American public.