“The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture.” ThinkingMenTryingYearsFirstsTwoBookDifferentReasonPoliticalCultureBlackPerfectBoysRightsHappenedGayFirst TimeEmpowermentTwentiesWestAcceptedErasOutsidersCoincidenceAmerican CultureFashionablePolitical CorrectnessBeing DifferentPostersGay RightsCorrectnessX Men Author:Mark Millar
“Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction” WritingFirstsMomentsEarthLastsMotherGivenCareersNovelHappenedWindMonthsWestSatisfactionEastSignificantFortyHousewifeManuscriptsLife HappensGood Earth Author:Pearl S. Buck
“I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.” IfsWorldYearsWarWholeHomeAmericaCultureHappenedNew YorkPeriodsWestSoldierPopulationWar Of The WorldsContinentsSan FranciscoFluidBack HomeJanuarySecond World WarNew Cultures Author:Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West.... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.” PeopleWayChildrenCountryHomeDreamSidesLossWorryHappenedSadnessCarStrangeCrossesLonelyTwentiesWestDefeatThings HappenGoldenMysteriousHighwaysStrange ThingsMigrantsNew PlacesPerplexed Author:John Steinbeck
“Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.” PeopleWayYearsTwoAmericaRememberTalkingHappenedWestSouthCommittedBonesFiftyHolocaustNaziSpainSomewhere ElseCongoArrivalsColumbusSouth AmericaWest IndiesTahiti Author:Jamaica Kincaid
“So, it just seemed like it happened naturally. We nailed our live show to some extent in a year or about a year and a half, maybe just a year of playing songs pretty much around L.A. then we went and scheduled a mini-tour up-state on the West Coast and that's when the whole Rough Trade [Records] thing started happening and from there, things just happened so quick. It changed really quickly.” YearsStatesWholeShowsSongHalfRecordsHappenedChangedHappeningsTradeWestRoughCoastWest Coast Author:Theresa Wayman
“My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance of the "West" epitomized by Cincinnati.” WritingBigsProcessHappenedPerspectiveImportanceWestNecksWriting ProcessSnapsParamount Author:Charles R. Morris