Michael Korda Quotes

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

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.

Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.

I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.

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?

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

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

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

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

English culture is highly literary-based.

I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

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.

Novelas are very respected in the Latin world.

Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

France will always be France no matter what, but America involves striving toward an ideal.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.