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No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Van Wyck Brooks

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Van Wyck Brooks
Age: 77 †
Born: 1886
Born: February 16
Died: 1963
Died: May 2
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Plainfield
New Jersey
Years
Dead
Vessel
Cape
Funny
Sailing
Capes
Lost
Sand
Sands
Inspirational
Desert
Horny
House
Judge
Iceberg
Three
Fit
Rounded
Two
Spent
Horn
Icebergs
Book
Judging
Horns
Bumped

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As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
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It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.
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Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means.
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If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
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The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
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Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
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The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
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The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
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Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
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Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
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No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
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The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
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People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.
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