Alfred Kazin > Quotes

“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

“One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.”
― Alfred Kazin

“When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.”
― Alfred Kazin

“Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit.”
― Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City

“Power beyond reason created a lasting irrationality.”
― Alfred Kazin

“The world of today is at the crossroads--[t]he whole scheme of aimless capitalism and the last dregs of traditionalist nationalism are being seen more clearly in their death struggle.”
― Alfred Kazin, Alfred Kazin's Journals

“Everything seems so small here now, old, mashed-in, more rundown even than I remember it, but with a heartbreaking familiarity at each door that makes me wonder if I can take in anything new, so strongly do I feel in Brownsville that I am walking in my sleep.”
― Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City

“In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax.”
― Alfred Kazin

“One writes to make a home for oneself on paper, in time, in other's minds.”
― Alfred Kazin

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

✓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?
✓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.
✓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.

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

✓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.
✓If we practiced medicine like we practice education, wed look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years.
✓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

“Illiterate and a nervous stammerer, she is nevertheless as resourceful and intuitive as the world was before it learned to read.”
― Alfred Kazin, NEW YORK JEW: An Autobiography

“On July 25, 1943, the day Mussolini fell, I was with Luce trying to shake off his objection to a long essay I had written for Fortune’s philosophy series on the vision of democracy according to Emerson, Melville, Whitman.”
― Alfred Kazin, NEW YORK JEW: An Autobiography

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

✓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.
✓To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.
✓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
✓We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along.”
― Alfred Kazin