16 Quotes by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

Yes, it’s hard to write. But it’s harder not to.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom’s Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.