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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

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Alfred Kazin
Age: 82 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 5
Died: 1998
Died: June 5
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Terrorist
Impoverishment
Concerned
Nourished
Personal
Calculating
Strange
Pseudo
Literature
Refusal
Spirit
Realism
Always
Terrorists
Life
Liberation
Eccentrics

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We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway.
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When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.
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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.
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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.
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If we practiced medicine like we practice education, wed look for the liver on the right side and left side in alternate years.
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A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.
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To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.
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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?
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One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others' minds.
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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.
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Only power can get people into a position where they may be noble.
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Art changes all the time, but it never improves. It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.
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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.
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