Steve Erickson Quotes

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.

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

a dream is only a memory of the future

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

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."

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

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

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

The material dictates the approach.

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

My own personal experience has become more first-hand.

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.

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.

If you're a smart writer, you listen.

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers.

When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.

Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.

Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy?

Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.