American Novel Quotes & Sayings

Have you come to terms with what's going to happen between us? — N.D. Jones

The Sun Dagger appeared on the rock face directly above the Shaman's shadowed head. It dazzled within the shade as the sunlight slipped through a gap in the overhead slabs. The dagger cut slowly down the rock, slicing through the very center of the etched spiral.
"The middle of time," Chaco whispered to himself. — P.J. Parker

Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.' — Rick Perlstein

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored. — Stephen King

People didn't know certain things about me, which ... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing. — Lou Reed

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one. — Sam Lipsyte

The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language. — Kenneth Oppel

People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome. — Isabel Allende

On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey? — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy. — Doris Lessing

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change.
"A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986 — Anthony Burgess

The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a "Jewish writer, " but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling of laughter and trembling is particularly manifest in his novel Henderson the Rain King, that follows an archetypal Protestant American into mythic Africa. Bellow not only influenced and paved the way for other American Jewish writers like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, but naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities. — Hana Wirth-Nesher

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. — Jasmine Cresswell

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

West Point - The Key to the Continent and Independence. — P.J. Parker

We live in a complicated society, Bromley - one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering? — P.J. Parker

Do you not recognize me? — P.J. Parker

Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom ... you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you.
I do see why Nikki likes the novel, as it's written so well. But her liking it makes me worry now that Nikki really doesn't believe in silver linings, because she says The Great Gatsby is the greatest novel ever written by an American, and yet it ends so sadly. One thing's for sure, Nikki is going to be very proud of me when I tell her I finally read her favorite book. -Silver Linings Playbook, p. 9 — Matthew Quick

It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an american businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead. — Vladimir Nabokov

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression American and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years. — Lucius Shepard

On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so he hoped. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace. — Lauren Groff

One large cat bounded up the side of the outcrop to stand in full view on an overhanging boulder. She stared down at them, inside their protective enclosure, tilting her head from side to side. Her scarred yellow-brown coat was immaculately groomed, but the long tufting hair of her snout was matted with the bright red smear of uncongealed blood from a recent kill. Her upper lip curved over the top of foot-long saber teeth. — P.J. Parker

I have just published a revised version of my book for Kindle and it will be available soon. When it is, I will make a formal announcement. The story is the same but without the noticeable errors. The revised paperback is already available, Thank you for your patience and thanks to all who are reading "A Woman Of Courage. — Eshelle Butler

We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands. — Edward Jay Epstein

My dad doesn't have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can't be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad. — Jeanne Darst

Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God's green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

For the girl without words, there is laughter for what is light, gesture for want, and tears for all that is dark. There is not much more. Names are nothing but extravagance. — Lois-Ann Yamanaka

A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Perhaps all love stories no matter how varied are essentially the same. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

The Day of Trouble is Near — P.J. Parker

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American. — Leslie Fiedler

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us
warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there
watching our every move. — Peter Orner

Writing is not about how well you can write the next "Great American Novel," using flawless grammar and snooty punctuation; sometimes, it's only about making someone smile, or laugh out loud. Sometimes, its sharing a fun thought, or putting a vivid life experience on paper so others' can share a great moment that had an impact on you, the author. — T. Hammond

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy's interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life's meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do. — P.J. Parker

But then it came time for me to make my journey - into America. [ ... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right. — Don DeLillo

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel. — John Hodgman

American literature has, since the time of the Puritans, featured the jeremiad as a prolonged complaint, a prophet's indictment of his society characteristic of work such as the muckrakers' novels or Allan Ginsberg's "Howl." Doctorow struggles to accommodate this form to his artistry (as successful practitioners of the work have always done). To this end, he has repeatedly adapted genres such as the Western, the romance, and the detective novel, often playing with accepted conventions, and thus avoiding didacticism. — Michelle M. Tokarczyk

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day's newspaper. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Time had taught him that whether his sins were pardoned or left unforgiven, they would remain committed. Tomorrow he would hopefully choose wiser, with a stronger measure of compassion. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets. — Robert Hass

She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long. — Clyde Brion Davis

A psychologically engrossing novel about the homes we make-in our houses, in our neighborhoods, and in the hearts of our loved ones. Laken takes on that great unspoken American subject-class-and does so with frankness, acuity and surpassing feeling. DREAM HOUSE is a memorable debut novel from a fully mature talent. — Peter Ho Davies

In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality. — Tom Peters

If Audrey sensed what he was contemplating, her silence did not let on. He turned from the window and found her looking at him with a flawless poker face. It may have been attentiveness and curiosity to hear what he would say next, or perhaps she was expecting from him what women throughout the ages, often against their better judgment, had expected of men. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes. — Zoe S. Roy

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. — David Hare

I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed. — Susan Choi

When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet. — Karl Marlantes

For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood. — Gene Luen Yang

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it. — Tony D'Souza

Everything about Jocelyn had been ordinary. A Norman Rockwell painting of mom, dad, one boy, one girl. Scott was her wild storm, her great American novel, her epic story. Every extraordinary moment she experienced was because of him. — Jessica Shook

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

We must love our slaves, Papa. We must love them as hard as we are able. — P.J. Parker

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. — W. Somerset Maugham

While he was writing the novel he received an invitation from the American University in Cairo, asking him to come and talk to their students. They said they couldn't pay him much but they could, if he were interested, arrange for him to take a boat up the Nile for a few days in the company of one of their leading Egyptologists. To see the world of ancient Egypt was one of his great unfulfilled dreams and he wrote back quickly. "If I could just finish my novel and arrange to come after that, that would be best," he suggested. Then he finished the novel,and it was The Satanic Verses, and a trip to Egypt became impossible, and he had to accept that he might never see the Pyramids, or Memphis, or Luxor, or Thebes, or Abu Simbel. It was one of the many futures he would lose. — Salman Rushdie

I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific. — James A. Michener

Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad. — Eudora Welty

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out. — Theodore Sturgeon

Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting--what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York--who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in--there are the real stories, incredible, heartbreaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware. — Wilton Barnhardt

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. — Robert Hughes

As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising. — Michael Lowenthal

'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs. — Bel Powley

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 — Epictetus

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.' — Pat Conroy

He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O'Hara, a bare-knuckles urban Huckleberry Finn. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal — Michael Chabon

God, I just love 'A Journey to the End of the Millennium,' by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably 'Humboldt's Gift.' — Michael Chabon

'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings. — Kate Christensen

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if ... " and it blossoms into a whole novel. — Jodi Picoult

When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine. — Brad Jensen

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [ ... ] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred. — Don DeLillo

My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that. — Philipp Meyer

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

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. — Rachel Kushner

I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens. — Haruki Murakami

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing - escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you'll find a compulsion to flee - a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores.
- Teller: A Novel — Frederick Weisel

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other. — Stanley Fish

Freeman looked up and grinned. "Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: 'The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.' Superb nonsense." Karl snorted. "Why are you reading such stuff?" "It's a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow." Karl — Gregory Benford

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

It was just a word. It took nothing from him. It made him feel only as low as he allowed himself to feel. His own brother used it in conversation habitually. But not in the same way - filled with malice, overflowing with insult. He couldn't tear his eyes away, shook with lust for retribution. Six little letters making one huge statement. NIGGER. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed. — Philip Roth

With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. — Bob Shacochis

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print.
Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day. — Nora Raleigh Baskin

It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art. — Clyde Brion Davis

The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists' hard earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the povery of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity. — Gordon S. Wood

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. — Scott Turow

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn't know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Do not fret, my brother, my child. For the buffalo will roam the plains once more. — P.J. Parker

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them. — Jeanette Winterson

Publishing has no onus to be representative, but a fourth of America lives in conditions close to or below the poverty line. Think about the last time you read a novel in which someone went to cash a benefit check or paid for food in food stamps, or got off a double-shift at a retail store and were having their home or car repossessed. These are the conditions in which much of this country lives and it is a dereliction of capability (not duty) to ignore it in literature. — John Freeman

There must have been some mistake. It took me a while to get a flight here, so I can see why you would have appointed a community lawyer to fill in." "Community lawyer!" Damon's face grew red with indignation. "I'm one of the most renowned lawyers among American Moroi." "Renowned, community." Abe shrugged and leaned back on his heals. "I don't judge. No pun intended."
Mead, Richelle (2010-05-18). Spirit Bound: A Vampire Academy Novel (p. 475). Penguin Young Readers Group. Kindle Edition. — Richelle Mead

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past
we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future. — Azar Nafisi

As a matter of fact, I constantly tell audiences all over the world that the single greatest icon of American culture from the publication of "To Kill A Mockingbird" was that novel so that if we say, what conversation can we have that would lead us on a road of tolerance, and teachers have decided that if you're going to teach values in a school in America, the answer that American teachers at all kinds of schools have come up with, just let Harper Lee teach "To Kill A Mockingbird." And then all the teacher has to do is stand back and guide the discussion. — Wayne Flynt