Steve Erickson Quotes & Sayings

This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara. — Steve Erickson

All of Wes Anderson's films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all. — Steve Erickson

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations. — Steve Erickson

When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored. — Steve Erickson

Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species. — Steve Erickson

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa. — Steve Erickson

I think we can fairly conclude that writer-director Joss Whedon didn't make 'The Avengers' for me. — Steve Erickson

I don't find perfection especially interesting. Art is not all about refinement and formal accomplishment. It is about passion and imagination and courage and these things that I didn't understand when I was kid being taught the rules. I realized that a novel could be. . .art could be. . . what I wanted to make it if I could pull it off. — Steve Erickson

Ironically, if only because over the years I've known so many - from college deans to studio executives to European expats - who come to Los Angeles aspiring to nothing other than living in Topanga, I wound up there by accident. — Steve Erickson

Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic. — Steve Erickson

As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate. — Steve Erickson

For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work. — Steve Erickson

Americans disagree about America because the most common consensus as to what America is or has ever been or ever was meant to be eludes us, and it eludes us because we want it to. — Steve Erickson

Taking place in some Nordic-looking hinterland where all the seasons are out of whack, 'Game of Thrones' is the most aggressive example since 'Battlestar Galactica' of a genre that's perceived as adolescent aspiring to be fully adult. — Steve Erickson

Beautiful women get in Hollywood's door quickest and then are shut out when their beauty no longer measures up to whatever it is that Hollywood or audiences decide is beautiful enough; once they're inside, their choices are limited by the same beauty that won them their entree. — Steve Erickson

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about. — Steve Erickson

I don't know for a fact, but I feel fairly certain that the first person who described a movie as 'character driven' had to have been a producer or studio executive. — Steve Erickson

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else. — Steve Erickson

Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century. — Steve Erickson

It's not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it. — Steve Erickson

You can't blame movies for embracing spectacle; filmmakers since D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille have loved spectacle, and spectacle is something that movies convey like no other medium, especially in a digital age. — Steve Erickson

The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done. — Steve Erickson

Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' believe it's a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren't altogether wrong. — Steve Erickson

For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun. — Steve Erickson

In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence. — Steve Erickson

Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true. — Steve Erickson

a dream is only a memory of the future — Steve Erickson

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny. — Steve Erickson

L.A. streets aren't just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city's sensibility. — Steve Erickson

Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes. — Steve Erickson

When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it. — Steve Erickson

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged. — Steve Erickson

He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can't see it anymore, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward. — Steve Erickson

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all. — Steve Erickson

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them. — Steve Erickson

Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers. — Steve Erickson

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that. — Steve Erickson

It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name. — Steve Erickson

Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.' — Steve Erickson

Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy? — Steve Erickson

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov. — Steve Erickson

'The Company You Keep' is about outgrowing not just the delusions that accompany youth but the harsh certainties driving our lives and then trapping them before the years outpace the velocity of our dreams. — Steve Erickson

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult." — Steve Erickson

1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more. — Steve Erickson

Lets say from the first moment of my life, everything's always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let's say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith
this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise ... Let's say I'm faithlessness made flesh, the modern age's leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment of compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully. — Steve Erickson

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them. — Steve Erickson

Being the family's literate one, my wife doesn't watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she'll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart. — Steve Erickson

I got out late winter. I was off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which is not bad calculations. I made the decision when I went in to keep track of the days, for the simple reason that it was the intention of my jailers to jettison my sense of time and place. They brought you in a metal truck with no windows and took you out in the same truck or one damned similar. The rumor was that Bell Federal Penitentiary was somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. The sight from my cell would not have refuted this. The white of the snow and sky filled my eyes like the sheet pulled over the head of a dead man. If it was not Montana-Saskatchewan, then it was the North Pole, or the moon. It was a signal to anyone who's ever doubted the terror of an idea that almost all of us in this prison that had no time or place were utterly guiltless of a violent act, unless one counts the violence of tongues. — Steve Erickson

America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two? — Steve Erickson

Inside every TV star is a movie star screaming to get out, and Donna Frenzel, with whom I'm guessing you're not instantly familiar, made George Clooney a movie star once and for all in the first ten minutes of his fifth feature, 1998's 'Out of Sight.' — Steve Erickson

That's editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It's telling us everything. It's telling us things we don't even know it's telling us. It's not just telling us what these characters think, it's telling us what we think. It's manipulative as hell, there's no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that's 'manipulative,' what they really mean is it's not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious. — Steve Erickson

You're in the lights and he thinks you're exposed, he's in the dark and he thinks he's hidden. But he's not hidden, he's dead, and you're not exposed, you're alive. — Steve Erickson

He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free.
Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love. — Steve Erickson

Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end. — Steve Erickson

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance. — Steve Erickson

The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart's burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that's beneath love, not good enough for love. — Steve Erickson

'Lincoln' is impressive enough to almost make you forget how much Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the endeavor. — Steve Erickson

Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it. — Steve Erickson

Besides inquiries as to our general well-being, the first thing asked about us, in our first seconds of being alive, is whether we're a boy or girl. Our first passport through this world is our genitals. — Steve Erickson

I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer. — Steve Erickson

In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else's in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. — Steve Erickson

The pornographer? He is concerned with what the characters do, while the artist, the artist is concerned with who the characters are. — Steve Erickson

Often a performance can be judged not by a movie's strongest moment but by its weakest, especially when it's the picture's crucial scene. — Steve Erickson

The most telling thing about 'Fargo,' both the now-classic movie and the television series, is that it doesn't take place in Fargo. — Steve Erickson

Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule. — Steve Erickson

As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves. — Steve Erickson

If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals. — Steve Erickson

The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood's view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade's view of everything else. — Steve Erickson

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish. — Steve Erickson

The '80s convergence of comics' new adult sensibility with the movies' advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' became phenomena. — Steve Erickson

Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast. — Steve Erickson

Beautiful actors are learning what beautiful actresses like Charlize Theron discovered a while ago - that they get taken more seriously when they trash the same beauty that got them taken seriously to begin with. — Steve Erickson

The beautifully composed imagery of '12 Years a Slave' underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that's poison to the touch. — Steve Erickson

Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result. — Steve Erickson

In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation. — Steve Erickson

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up. — Steve Erickson

A street is a story in asphalt - so it's a paradox that the streets are the one place where the movies play fast and loose with continuity, something to which L.A. streets lend themselves as naturally as does the city's psyche. — Steve Erickson

You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them. — Steve Erickson

Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams. — Steve Erickson

What we call 'the news' always has tried to tell a story, and it's always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling. — Steve Erickson

Some distant day, anthropologists will consider as a landmark in humankind's evolution - comparable to the capacity for destroying ourselves by nuclear obliteration - the adolescent gene's newly emergent power to dictate nightly TV viewing. — Steve Erickson

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite. — Steve Erickson

Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn't have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that's often nothing but. — Steve Erickson

When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come. — Steve Erickson

I rode the buses in L.A. until I was in my early 30s, and there's something about driving or riding through L.A. after sundown, when the Utopian city goes into hiding and another city comes out, more Doors and less Byrds. — Steve Erickson

Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative. — Steve Erickson

Hopefully it doesn't come as too much of a shock that artists we love watching or listening to for an hour or two aren't always people with whom we otherwise would want to spend 20 minutes. — Steve Erickson

Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity. — Steve Erickson

I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails. — Steve Erickson

Walter Cronkite was the last newsman everyone trusted in the same way that the Beatles were the last music everyone loved and Marilyn was the last star everyone concurred was worthy of the word. — Steve Erickson

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake. — Steve Erickson

'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner. — Steve Erickson

When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them. — Steve Erickson

Even if you haven't seen 'The Seventh Seal,' you've seen it. The influence is so vast and insidious, every image of a black-robed, white-faced Death is a rip or parody of 'The Seventh Seal.' — Steve Erickson

Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made. — Steve Erickson

The Doors formed on the beaches of Los Angeles, in what you might imagine is the tradition of local rock bands since the Beach Boys. — Steve Erickson

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline. — Steve Erickson

Let's say I dared to suspend myself in the moment between breaths. — Steve Erickson

A modern fascination with the fantastic seems to come along every couple of generations, usually at a point when we're future saturated. — Steve Erickson

I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn't an act of fury, fury isn't part of it anymore. It's more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation. — Steve Erickson