30 Quotes by Van Wyck Brooks

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

Eschew the skylark and the nightingale, birds that Audubon never found. A national literature ought to be built, as the robin builds its nest, out of the twigs and straws of one's native meadows.

Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

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.

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.