Quote

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

Steve Erickson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steve Erickson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: April 20
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Monica
California
Stephen Michael Erickson
Need
Needs
Writing
Novels
Novel
Write
Ends

More quotes by Steve Erickson

Image
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
Image
In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.
Steve Erickson
Image
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
Image
I'm my own ideal reader in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
Steve Erickson
Image
I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.
Steve Erickson
Image
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
Image
I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.
Steve Erickson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.
Steve Erickson
Image
Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.
Steve Erickson
Image
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
Image
I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
Steve Erickson
Image
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
Image
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.
Steve Erickson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.
Steve Erickson
Image
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