Van Wyck Brooks Quotations

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

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

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

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.