Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoile...d by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious track...ing down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing, his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the Athenian tragedy he ins...tills into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his barbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, his wives who sit and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting the spirit in disintegration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of which Conra...d tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries ...pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms, takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runs... monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not worth knowing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, held ba...ck by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant and illuminating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon hol...iness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I am defeated for the next nomination, I think it will be by [Charles Evans] Hughes. And I don't think he will allow his name t...o be used unless he really feels that I have no chance to win. I do not think Theodore Roosevelt will allow his name to come before the convention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »