Alfred Kazin Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

Alfred Kazin
The task is to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up.

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
Any critic who is any good is going to write out of a profound inner struggle between what has been and what must be, the values he is used to and those which presently exist, between the past and the present out of which the future must be born.

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

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

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

Alfred Kazin
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
Hollywood ceased to be Hollywood when television moved into the American home … Hollywood today is unimpressive, seems outmoded, a pale memory of itself.

Alfred Kazin
I feel as if I were the site of many storms. Everything keeps thundering through me.

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
From my first conscious moments I was absorbed in the most intimate problems of the working class, in the fire and color of immigrant life. I was by temperament created for the idea of revolution, in the sense of making the world over and creating a new society.

Alfred Kazin
Cancer is the subversive sea licking at the shores of everything supposed to be established and safe.

Alfred Kazin
One advantage of getting old. So many people do not share my past that I am free to invent it.

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
The 'Beats' are mostly middle-class kids looking for kicks,'' he wrote in 1960. ''They're bored by the fat-dripping society around them. The kids coming up now see a bunch of tired liberals shooting off their mouths about what happened in the 30's. They can't get interested.

Alfred Kazin