Quote

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

Steve Erickson

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Steve Erickson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: April 20
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Monica
California
Stephen Michael Erickson
Idea
Dreamland
War
Schizophrenia
Place
Utopia
America
Socially
States
Manifest
Ideas
Becoming
Always
Went
United

More quotes by Steve Erickson

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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
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To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.
Steve Erickson
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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
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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.
Steve Erickson
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I'm my own ideal reader in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
Steve Erickson
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By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.
Steve Erickson
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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.
Steve Erickson
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If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.
Steve Erickson
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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
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In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.
Steve Erickson
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I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.
Steve Erickson
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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
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a dream is only a memory of the future
Steve Erickson
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Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.
Steve Erickson
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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
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I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.
Steve Erickson
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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.
Steve Erickson
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In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.
Steve Erickson
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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
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My own personal experience has become more first-hand.
Steve Erickson