Steve Erickson Quotes

United States, Novelist
April 20, 1950

Stephen Michael "Steve" Erickson is an American novelist. The recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is the only Southern California novelist to win the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award previously bestowed on William Gaddis, William H. Gass and John Barth.

In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.

Steve Erickson
- Influence
- Lives
- Currency
Often a performance can be judged not by a movie's strongest moment but by its weakest, especially when it's the picture's crucial scene.

Steve Erickson
- Performance
- Scene
- Judged

Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.

Steve Erickson
- Promise
- Made
- Slavery
In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

Steve Erickson
When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.

Steve Erickson
There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.

Steve Erickson
- Like
- Characters
- Rule
Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.

Steve Erickson
Dream is only a memory of the future.

Steve Erickson
- Future
- Dream
- Memory

I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.

Steve Erickson
- Books
- Influence
- Writer
To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

Steve Erickson