All Alfred Kazin Quotes
- I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something.… American
- One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others' minds. Home
- When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair. Affair
- To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.... Consider
- We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along. Along
- If we practiced medicine like we practice education, wed look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years. Alternate
- Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. Altogether
- Brooklyn Heights itself is a window on the port. Here, where the perspective is fixed by the towers of Manhattan and the hills of New… American
- Walking I am unbound, and find that precious unity of life and imagination, that silent outgoing self, which is so easy to loose, but which… Act
- Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve. All
- What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle… Businessman
- A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own. Binge
- Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new… American
- Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the… Calculating
- The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny… Capitalism
- What happens whenever we convert a writer into a symbol is that we lose the writer himself in all his indefeasible singularity, his particular inimitable… All
- A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive. Alive
- History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as… Ability
- The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a… Anticlimax