Steve Erickson Quotes - Page 2

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

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

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

My own personal experience has become more first-hand.

The material dictates the approach.

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.

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

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

The last thing I want is that sense of artifice - rather I want the reader drawn into the story and lost in it and vested in it. So the emotional connection is everything, albeit a connection on my terms.

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.

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.

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.

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.

One of the reasons I'm not so keen on people calling me an "experimental" writer is that it suggests the work is about the experiment, when it's always the opposite - any "experimentation" is dictated by the material.

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

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

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.

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

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

If you're a smart writer, you listen.