Sam Abell Quotes

These natives prefer the name of Americans to that of Creoles, since the peace of Versailles, and particularly since 1789, one often hears them say with pride: “I am not a Spaniard, I am an American.”

I was born in Iran, left at a very young age-less than a year old-and grew up and was educated in the West. I grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it-at least culturally.

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

It's funny that Chairman Mao's great hero was Napoleon, because Napoleon started out as a revolutionary for the underdogs and then made himself an emperor. In fact, a lot of revolutionary leaders do that, and you think, "Well, that's spoiling your argument. What are you doing?" But on the other hand, the people themselves are enjoying trying out all these different ways to be. I hope that, like the Japanese, the Chinese hang on to their own traditions as well as try out Western ones. I hate it when people just lose so much confidence in who they are that they abandon their own culture.

Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often.

I'm comfortable, culturally I'm American, my perspectives are American, but from an aesthetic perspective do other people look at me and think that I'm American?

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.

The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.

I am a proud American, regardless of the fact that my parents were separated from me forcefully.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

Some call me a Cuban hyphen American. I reject that. I don't believe in hyphenated Americans.

My father was up against so many different types of resistance. His whole life was an interplay of East and West. He was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, which was under British rule then.

While I resonate deeply with my maternal cultural heritage, I identify as American.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.

'Beloved' by Toni Morrison. I think I read it first in college and have read it every few years since. The language itself is remarkable. I don't know that I've read a book that explains America so well.

A lot of people forget that Americans are immigrants. People are forgetting that, to where people have this attitude, 'We're Americans, go back to your country. Go back. This is a free country.' I always heard that growing up. I always heard that.

To me, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and my identity is of a suburban Chicago person. It's not like, 'Oh, I'm Indian.' I'm not. I'm American.

The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably 'Dew in the Morning', an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated 'Strife,' in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection 'Can We Talk?'

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

I've always had a complex relationship towards my identity as an American.

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

Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we're either visionaries, 'noble savages,' squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We're very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.

I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.