Kazin Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under conscious control, it is possible to conquer the OK plateau. — Joshua Foer

To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history ... — Alfred Kazin

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

Brooklyn Heights itself is a window on the port. Here, where the perspective is fixed by the towers of Manhattan and the hills of New Jersey and Staten Island, the channels running between seem fingers of the world ocean. Here one can easily embrace the suggestion, which Whitman felt so easily, that the whole American world opens out from here, north and west. — Alfred Kazin

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished. — Hilary Mantel

You have taught me that I am allowed to like myself as I am, at whatever stage I am in. I can change, I can stay the same, or I can be whoever it is that is right for me; but I can be satisfied. No, more than that. I can be proud. I can celebrate. That is what I am going to do. — Jessica Park

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

Other pirates leaped over the railing. One, two ... seven ... thirteen. A baker's dozen. Wait, fifteen. Eighteen ... Twenty-one. The odds weren't in our favor.
"Maybe they just came over to borrow a cup of sugar," I said.
Andrea barked a short laugh. Curran put his hand on my shoulder. "That's a lot of sugar. Must be a big cake. — Ilona Andrews

Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. — Alfred Kazin

Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word. If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration. — Mikhail Bakhtin

We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along. — Alfred Kazin

Now you can't even carry a nail clipper on a plane. Are they afraid you're going to go ... "All right! Give me the plane or the b*tch loses her cuticle." ? — Robin Williams

Hope died as I was led unto my marriage bed. — Julia Ward Howe

Only power can get people into a position where they may be noble. — Alfred Kazin

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

Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it. — E.B. White

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience. — David Levering Lewis

Whoever lacks faith is powerless;
whoever does not pray is helpless.
Whoever prays for the poor enriches himself;
whoever prays for the sick heals himself. — Matshona Dhliwayo

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

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

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

People ask me, 'Is 3D a good medium for horror movies?' I think it's the perfect thing for horror movies because it really puts you into it. — Tania Raymonde

I find it very hard to write about Jewish history. — Simon Schama

A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive. — Alfred Kazin

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

The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause. — Michael Kazin

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

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

Walking I am unbound, and find that precious unity of life and imagination, that silent outgoing self, which is so easy to loose, but which a high moments seems to start up again from the deepest rhythms of my own body. How often have I had this longing for an infinite walk - of going unimpeded, until the movement of my body as I walk fell into the flight of streets under my feet - until I in my body and the world in its skin of earth were blended into a single act of knowing. — 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. — Alfred Kazin

I would as lief look upon a piece of pastrami-stained paper as on the face of Alfred Kazin. — Saul Bellow

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

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

When you're fighting for social justice, one of my biggest pet peeves is speaking out of ignorance. — Eva Longoria