Karen Abbott Quotes

Elvis ate America before America ate him.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

Don King is as American as apple pie. He is America.

I certainly think I'll end up writing about America in some form. I've taken plenty of notes. I like America very much.

I'm not talking about Russia in my music. I've never been to Russia. I'm not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China. I'm talking about me being American and growing up in a crazy world and helping to reflect all different sides of life.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

For me, the American promise isn't just an idea or a theory - it's my life story.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

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.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous, and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share of America.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

I just wanted it to be American.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

The erosion of equal opportunity is among the greatest threats to our exceptionalism as a nation. But it also provides us with an exciting and historic opportunity: to help more people than ever achieve the American Dream.

Being a melting pot is what I think is great about being American, and also that we get to do something that other people don't get to do, we get to be a hyphenate. That's a good thing.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.

Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

It's quintessentially American to transform your family.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America...

People from all over the world came to America and assimilated into a single culture rooted in the founding, which is rooted in individual liberty and primacy of citizen over government. Everybody who came here, that's what drew them.