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Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.

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
Backgrounds
Writers
Talent
Personal
Social
Paralyzed
Vivid
Possessed
Background

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Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
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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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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 writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
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Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means.
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The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.
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Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
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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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Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.
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Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
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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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As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
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No one in this country has any root anywhere we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.
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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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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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Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.
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Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
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How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world around them.
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