Bret Harte Quotes

If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity.

Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.

It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.

I understand things that are American, for better or worse.

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

Our great American writers were all newspaper people.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

Life is very important to Americans.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.

I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.

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

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Envy is the central fact of American life.

Well, rather than to give you my impression on Los Angeles, per se, my older sister's husband is and American, therefore I have a pretty good idea of the, perhaps the characteristics of Americans in general.

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

My wife is French, and so I get to see America through her eyes, which informs a lot of little moments. It means I can poke fun at very particular things about us.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

People don't realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I've known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

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

There's nothing political about American literature.

Thirty seconds is the exact amount of time Americans can tolerate something they don't understand.

It amazes me when I talk to people in their early 20s and they've never read the classics, things we read as children. When you don't have knowledge and understanding, then fear rises in you.

The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.

I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.