Quotes by Steve Erickson - Page 3 | QuoteForever

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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 / Novelist
Capacity
Destroying
Evolution
Humankind
Nuclear
Tv
Adolescent
Comparable
Consider
Dictate
Distant
Gene
Landmark
Newly
Nightly
Viewing
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While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Emotional
Nerves
Thinking
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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 / Novelist
Accounts
Distinguished
Frank
Nice People
Reed
Controversies
Gibson
Hemingway
Norman
Picasso
Sinatra
Unrelated
Van
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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 / Novelist
Flashback
Photography
Precise
Reflection
Surface
Differently
Profoundly
Trailing
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To an extent, our relationship with the movies is always subjective. Our capacity to be involved says as much about each of us; I've never fathomed why anyone would want to spend four hours in the company of the exceedingly tiresome Scarlett O'Hara.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Subjective
Tiresome
Exceedingly
Extent
Scarlett
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I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can't be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from 'Tokyo Story' to 'Poison Ivy: The New Seduction' and not have a Bergman movie.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Bergman
Ivy
Poison
Seduction
Tokyo
Critic
Fellow
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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 / Novelist
Familiar
Fifth
Guessing
Movie Star
Sight
Clooney
Feature
George
George Clooney
Instantly
Screaming
Ten Minutes
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Redford always has been a cool presence both before and behind the camera. His best movie as a filmmaker, 1994's 'Quiz Show,' exhibits a classicism verging on self-repression, and the social indignation in many of his films engages more than moves you.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Movie
Cool
Filmmaker
Indignation
Quiz
Social
Best Always More
Cool Best Always
Before
Show
Camera
Films
Presence
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'Homeland' was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Acclaim
Emmys
Homeland
Obsessive
Overrated
Forms
Gate
Unlike
Measured
Sensation
Purely
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Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Odds
Response
Mysteries
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In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Danish
Descendants
Arc
Joan
Scandinavian
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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 / Novelist
Advancing
Convergence
Sensibility
Catch
Phenomena
Returns
Watchmen
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In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Critical
Gates
Validity
Genres
Guardians
Linger
Perceptions
Transcend
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It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt misogynist [Donald Trump] over the first woman president. Someone will have to explain that one to me someday.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Men
Voting
White Man
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That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Blockbuster
Driven
Hero
Transformation
War Hero
Breaks
Empire
Entirely
Godfather
Youngest
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It became inescapable that as conservatives were wrong about people of color, they were also wrong about women. They were wrong about gay people. The only individual freedoms they seemed to get exercised about were the freedom to make a profit and the freedom to own a gun.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Color
Gay
Gun
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Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Disdain
Effort
Theory
Undermining
Vice Versa
War Peace Great
Amendment
Confederacy
Eliminate
Embodied
Great Man
Lincoln
Passage
Prospective
Struggling
Versa
Vice
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'Homeland' is necessarily open-ended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving as little as possible, with a story's usual need for resolution replaced by an unrelenting urgency that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Closure
Homeland
Replaced
Resolution
Unrelenting
Usual
Time Always Possible
Open-Ended
Resolving
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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 / Novelist
Beautiful Women
Beauty Women Beautiful
Measures
Shut
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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 / Novelist
Abbey
Ashamed
Nonsense
Revolution
Species
Unforgiving
Unpatriotic
Downton Abbey
Fought
Practically
Notions
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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 / Novelist
Antipathy
Civil War
Dedicated
Great Men
Hostility
Logic
Stature
War History Men
Confirmed
Lincoln
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Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies and directed by Sundance nominee James Ponsoldt, 'The End of the Tour' is a terrific film, among the year's best with its two-man tarantella of wall-to-wall talk - and I watched it through my fingers as though it were Mad Max.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Fingers
Max
Sundance
Terrific
Watched
Directed
Donald
Nominee
James
Pulitzer
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The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Artistic
Inevitable
Monitoring
Notion
Alternative
Conclusions
Satisfactory
Unacceptable
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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 / Novelist
Arriving
Finish Line
Italian
Mortality
Surprise
Walking Dead
Zombie
Center
Finish
Recent
Spirits
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'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 / Novelist
Ocean
Abbey
Creator
Extravagant
Icy
Pageant
Passing
Downton Abbey
Grand
Seas
Surely
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For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Acknowledge
Appeals
Intuition
Logic
Nature Best Art
Brief
Insisted
Thousands
Thousands Of Years
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I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Ink
May
Pages
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Created by writer Beau Willimon, who's worked on several political campaigns, 'House of Cards' cannily exploits the current widespread cynicism for our politics, catering to a public scorn that's warranted and also glib in the sort of cheap pox-on-both-houses way that means not having to pay attention.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Campaigns
Cards
Catering
Exploits
House Of Cards
Pay Attention
Scorn
Beau
Cheap
Current
Widespread
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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 / Novelist
Birth
Driven
Engaged
Instant
Notion
Activities
Stopped
In Other Words
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To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Character
Creating
Play
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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 / Novelist
Gorgeous
Grotesque
Imagery
Obscene
Poison
Savagery
Slave
Touch
Beautifully
Shot
Blossom
Composed
Ladies
Subject
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Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Clue
Distance
Evoke
Hitting
Instance
Now And Then
Author
Bell
Button
Chooses
Editor
Exquisitely
Pause
Ponder
Sonic
Copy Quote
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 / Novelist
Book
Character
Strong
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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 / Novelist
Popular Music
Sun
Territory
Vicious
Confess
Distinct
Occupied
Strip
Timeline
Wedge
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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 / Novelist
Independence
Contradiction
Declaration
Edited
Including
Slave
Southern
Author
Clause
Compel
Document
Owner
Himself
Jefferson
Sign
Southern States
Thomas
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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 / Novelist
Blast
Clock
Cnn
Coast
Gulf War
Incidents
Irresistible
Lighting
Proximity
Screens
Space Shuttle
Alarming
Established
Bomb
Challenger
Cover
Explosion
Round
Gulf
Import
Network
Shuttle
Subsequent
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I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we're going to reconcile the America that elected the first African American president with the America that just elected a president avidly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan - I'm not sure I even want to reconcile the two.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Ku Klux Klan
Thinking
Two
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One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greater individual freedom grows - is just flatly contradicted by crucial junctures in the country's life, most conspicuously in the 1860s and 1960s, when it's been the federal government that's interceded against the states to secure individual freedom.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Government
Country
Philosophical
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I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, civil rights and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side historically and morally, and that it took too much intellectual and psychological jujitsu to pretend otherwise. I didn't want to pretend anymore; I wanted to be on the right side.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Justice
Rights
Wings
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There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
War
Culture
White
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Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like my judgmentalism; I didn't like my absolutism. I didn't like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Emotional
Generosity
Thinking
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Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Creative
Thinking
Wind
Copy Quote
In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Kids
Men
Thinking
Copy Quote
There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to that point and have the character make clear that he or she doesn't want to do that at all. That long phone conversation I thought the character was going to have? He hangs up the phone before the other person answers, and twenty pages of dialog I had half written in my head go out the window.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Character
Long
Phones
Copy Quote
To the extent that I've ever understood postmodernism - and I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I'm not one of them - one of its distinguishing traits is the story's awareness of its own artifice, and how that awareness becomes part of the story. And if that's right, then I have no idea how I ever got lumped into postmodernism except that I believe, since I was first published, people just haven't quite known where else to put me.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Believe
Ideas
People
Copy Quote
In terms of America, I think any profound consideration is bound to return us to the notion of twins because, though you certainly can contend there are many Americas, our history has been binary from the beginning, with its hairline fracture down the country's center between what American has wanted to be and what America has been. That fracture is slavery, of course. To some extent it's still slavery, in that collectively we refuse to come to grips with the American fact of slavery.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
America
Country
Thinking
Copy Quote
Half the country seceded from the other half when Abraham Lincoln was elected because half the country couldn't abide his position on slavery. You would think 150 years later this had all become pretty historically incontestable. Yet millions continue to contest it in the face of history. Rather the denial of slavery and all its monstrous repercussions defines to one twin America what the country is and means, and therein is the DNA of those "alternative facts" that people believe when they can't stand to believe the truth.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
Believe
Country
Mean
Copy Quote
With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.
Steve Erickson / Novelist
America
People
Two
Copy Quote

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