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

Steve Erickson

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Steve Erickson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: April 20
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Monica
California
Stephen Michael Erickson
America
Music
Arguably
Contribution
Cultural
Otherwise
Western
Century
Greatest

More quotes by 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.
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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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My own personal experience has become more first-hand.
Steve Erickson
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a dream is only a memory of the future
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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.
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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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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
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.
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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I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
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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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
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In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.
Steve Erickson