Steve Erickson Quotes:

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.

Topics: May, Pages, Lasts

a dream is only a memory of the future

source: - Steve Erickson (1999). “The Sea Came in at Midnight”, Avon Books

Topics: Dream, Memories

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.

Topics: Congratulations, Self, Expression

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.

source: - Steve Erickson (2013). “Rubicon Beach: A Novel”, p.77, Open Road Media

Topics: Water, Swim, Shadow

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

Topics: Thinking

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Men, White Man, Voting

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Thinking, Two, Ku Klux Klan

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Gay, Gun, Color

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Wings, Rights, Justice, Racial Justice

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Hands, Order, Becoming

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.

Topics: War, Ideas, America, Dreamland

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Country, Philosophical, Government

I have members of my immediate family, and my wife's immediate family, who voted for Donald Trump, and now there's this gulf that I have no interest in bridging however much I love those people. It's almost like the Civil War.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: War, People, Wife, Immediate Family

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Country, Believe, Mean, Repercussions

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Emotional, Thinking, Generosity

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Country, Thinking, America, Binary, Fracture

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

Topics: Fiction, Sake, Not Interested, Creating Characters

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Two, America, People, Western Music

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Writing, Answers, Reason

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.

source: - "Steve Erickson and Zeroville: An Interview with a True American Original". Interview With Jeff VanderMeer, www.amazonbookreview.com. November 27, 2007.

Topics: Character, Phones, Long

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Believe, Ideas, People, Postmodernism

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: War, White, Culture, Locked

If you're a smart writer, you listen.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Smart, Ifs

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Kids, Men, Thinking, Credo

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Emotional, Connections, Stories, Emotional Connection

These days in particular it seems not only unavoidable but even irresponsible to not acknowledge politics in some way.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Way, These Days, Acknowledge

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

Topics: Believe, Inspiration, Writing

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Sex, Memories, Rip, Space Time Continuum, Morphing

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Recorded Music, Blackboard

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

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Western Music

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.

source: - Source: therumpus.net

Topics: Uncool