# Who is the most quotable American writer?

> Nobel laureates share this ballot with newspaper wits and one gonzo journalist. The winner is whoever you actually quote out loud.

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-quotable-american-writer*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Ernest Hemingway** — score 1000/1000
   Nobel-winning novelist whose stripped-down sentences made him the most imitated stylist in American fiction.
2. **Mark Twain** — score 681/1000
   Humorist and novelist whose aphorisms about politics, lying and human nature still circulate daily.
3. **Emily Dickinson** — score 681/1000
   Reclusive poet whose compressed verses on death and hope read like epigrams.
4. **Maya Angelou** — score 662/1000
   Poet and memoirist whose lines on courage and dignity became modern proverbs.
5. **Henry David Thoreau** — score 661/1000
   Author of Walden, source of endless lines about simplicity and living deliberately.
6. **Walt Whitman** — score 600/1000
   Poet of Leaves of Grass, whose expansive lines are quoted in speeches and film alike.
7. **Dorothy Parker** — score 600/1000
   Algonquin Round Table wit whose one-liners outlived most of the plays she reviewed.
8. **Flannery O'Connor** — score 529/1000
   Southern Gothic story writer whose sharp lines on grace and violence are endlessly cited.
9. **Edgar Allan Poe** — score 529/1000
   Poet and horror pioneer whose refrains from The Raven are recited from memory.
10. **F. Scott Fitzgerald** — score 448/1000
   Chronicler of the Jazz Age whose lines from The Great Gatsby are quoted at graduations and weddings alike.
11. **Joan Didion** — score 448/1000
   Essayist whose opening sentences on California and grief are quoted as models of prose.
12. **John Steinbeck** — score 448/1000
   Novelist of the Depression whose plainspoken lines on work and dignity keep getting reprinted.
13. **Ralph Waldo Emerson** — score 353/1000
   Essayist of self-reliance whose sentences founded the American habit of quotable philosophy.
14. **Toni Morrison** — score 353/1000
   Nobel laureate whose sentences on love, memory and freedom are quoted as often as her novels are taught.
15. **Hunter S. Thompson** — score 353/1000
   Gonzo journalist whose manic sentences about America became bumper-sticker material.
16. **William Faulkner** — score 353/1000
   Nobel laureate of the American South, quoted for his lines on the past and endurance.
17. **James Baldwin** — score 241/1000
   Novelist and essayist whose lines on race and America are quoted in every new civil-rights debate.
18. **Kurt Vonnegut** — score 106/1000
   Satirist whose deadpan refrains, So it goes among them, became a generational shorthand.

Tags: usa, books, classics, quotes, writers