Margaret Fuller Quotes

The establishment, the newspapers, they try to create something called Scottish literature, but when people are actually going to write, they are not going to necessarily prescribe to that, they'll write what they feel.

With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

The separation of the Western man from the seaboard, and his environment, made him in a large degree free from European precedents and forces. He looked at things independently and with small regard or appreciation for the best Old World experience. He had no ideal of a philosophical, eclectic nation, that should advance civilization by intercourse with foreigners and familiarity with their point of view, and readiness to adopt whatever is best and most suitable in their ideas, manners, and customs

A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation's mind in writing and the concentration of intellect for the purpose of spreading itself abroad and multiplying its energy

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

We're Americans. It's a culture. We should defend that culture, and we should reinforce that culture.

Part of my mission as an actor has been to define what an American is.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I want to create a theater that looks, feels, and smells like America.

'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

Art in America should be American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement.

There are artists in Belgium who try to imitate American artists. But it's like, if you're Belgian pretending to be American, you won't be better than the American because you aren't American. You have to do your own stuff.

Don't you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?

No country can become a nation by producing a race of imitators.

Your obligation as writers is to distinguish yourself. … The ultimate result should be a book that you write that no one else could have written.

There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous--secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will--we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books . . . we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

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.

I think there is a kind of laconic Australian leg-pulling sense of humor that is certainly in some of my stories, or is an element in some of my books, and that's probably a direct result of where I've grown up. But other than that I don't draw particularly on the Australian landscape or the Australian biology and so on. So I don't think there's anything you could point to and say is particularly Australian.

My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral

There's nothing political about American literature.