20th Century America Quotes

Here's one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan.

I was a gay man living in the epicenter of 20th-century America's worst health epidemic.

I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson's masterly saga, 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.

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.

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.