Alfred Kazin Quotes

#1. A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

Alfred Kazin

#2. 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 and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.

Alfred Kazin

#3. To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history ...

Alfred Kazin

#4. 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 generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.

Alfred Kazin

#5. Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway.

Alfred Kazin

#6. 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 of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

Alfred Kazin

#7. 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 a whole.

Alfred Kazin

#8. 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.

Alfred Kazin

#9. I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogative.

Alfred Kazin

#10. 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. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves.

Alfred Kazin

#11. 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 curious anticlimax.

Alfred Kazin

#12. We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along.

Alfred Kazin

#13. If we practiced medicine like we practice education, we'd look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years.

Alfred Kazin

#14. 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 genius.

Alfred Kazin

#15. One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

Alfred Kazin

#16. Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

Alfred Kazin

#17. When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

Alfred Kazin

#18. 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 spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?

Alfred Kazin

#19. Only power can get people into a position where they may be noble.

Alfred Kazin