Politics: who are the novelists voting for?

Only Slate and English majors care. There are plenty more on the site, but here are excerpts from the writers that actually matter to anybody. Note that only Orson Scott Card, a devout mormon whose Ender's Game was probably the most disappointing novel I read all through college, is voting for Bush.

Amy Tan

I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he.

John Updike

I look forward to voting for John Kerry, a man of exemplary intelligence who was brave in war and then brave in protest of war. I don't look for him to reverse our course in Iraq overnight, nor to provide quick fixes for global or national problems, but there are certain things I am sure he will not do: He won't try to pack the Supreme Court and other judiciary with anti-choice judges; he won't push for an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment; he won't try to perform voodoo economics with tax cuts and a raging deficit. The present president has his virtues and his good intentions, but I'm not sure the United States can afford four more years of his administration.

Joyce Carol Oates

Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Our culture has become politicized to a degree that verges upon hysteria. And since I live in New Jersey, a state in which an "honest politician" is someone who hasn't yet been arrested, I have come to have modest, that's to say realistic expectations about public life.

Orson Scott Card

I'm a Democrat voting for Bush, even though on economic issues, from taxes to government regulation, I'm not happy with the Republican positions. But we're at war, and electing a president who is committed to losing it seems to be the most foolish thing we could do. Personal honesty is also important to me, and Kerry is obviously not in the running on that point, given that he can't keep track of the facts in his own autobiography.

Jonathan Franzen

Kerry, of course. He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot. She'd be a first lady for the ages.

Take a cold shower, Johnny.