A Quote by George Pelecanos

I find 'True Grit' to be one of the very best American novels: It is a rousing adventure story and deeply perceptive about the makeup of the American character.

George Pelecanos

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About Adventure American American Character Best Best American Character Deeply Find Grit Makeup Novels Perceptive Story True True Grit Very

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George Pelecanos
American - Author
Born: February 18, 1957

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

Colson Whitehead

In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.

Hanya Yanagihara

The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.

Aldo Leopold

To me, 'Kita y Fernanda' is very much an American story, and I know some people are going to think it's a Latina story, but it's about shifting people's paradigms and views of what it is to be American.

Tanya Saracho

My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.

Laurie Graham

My idea of no makeup on actors is really no makeup. I mean, they can be wearing makeup. I don't care what they're wearing as long as it looks like they're not wearing makeup. But an actress will suddenly appear with some lipstick on. And that's makeup. Keener's character wears makeup. Her character would wear makeup. I try to stay true to whoever that person is. I hate that kind of thing where you're waking up in the morning with makeup on in a movie. I just think it pulls you out of the movie.

Nicole Holofcener

The short story is kind of a precision tool. It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape, without having to commit myself to a full-length novel. I find a lot of novels out there very boring.

David Means

There is a problem in America. An Irish or Polish American can write a story and it's an American story. When a Black American writes a story, it's called a Black story. I take exception to that. Every artist has articulated to his own experience. The problem is that some people do not see Blacks as Americans.

Gloria Naylor

With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.

Mira Nair

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American.

Russell Means

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.

Henry Adams

Nietzsche said that everyone tells themselves the story of their life. That's true about countries, too. We're constantly telling ourselves the American story.

Ben Dreyfuss

The story of the Underground Railroad is the story of American heroes, and who doesn't want to hear a story about American heroes?

Misha Green

I chose the American ones, more or less the last five years of the silent era, because those are the ones that aged the best in the way they tell the story. One, it's about human beings with context. It's a very classical story with feelings, with laughter, melodrama and it really works, the good ones - Murnau's American movies, John Ford's Four Sons, King Vidor's The Crowd, or the (Josef) von Sternberg movies. You can watch it now and it still works. I mean they are really, really good pieces so this is where I tried to work.

Michel Hazanavicius

As I've written more, and as other Indian American voices have grown around me, I strive harder to find experiences that are unique yet a meaningful and resonant part of the American story.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I have always been in favor of a healthy Americanization, but that does not mean a complete disavowal of our German heritage. It means that our character should take on the best of that which is American, and combine it with the best of that which is German. By doing this, we can best serve the American people and their civilization.

Carl Schurz

A Quote by George Pelecanos

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