Quotes by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Carl Clinton Van Doren

American critic and biographer

Lived from: 1885 - 1980

Category: Media

Quotes 1 till 14 of 14.

  • 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.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
    ― Carl Van Doren
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  • Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • Guy Rivers, a conventional piece as regards the love affair which makes a part of the plot, is a tale of deadly strife between the laws of Georgia and a fiendish bandit.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • 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.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • 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.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • Neither creator nor critic can make himself universal by barely taking thought about it. He is what he lives. The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts Into his work. The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.
    The Roving Critic (1923)
    ― Carl Van Doren
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  • The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.
    ― Carl Van Doren
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  • The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.
    ― Carl Van Doren
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  • The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.
    ― Carl Van Doren
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  • 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.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.
    ― Carl Clinton Van Doren
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  • Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to.
    ― Carl Van Doren
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What are the most famous quotes from Carl Clinton Van Doren?

The two most famous quotes from Carl Clinton Van Doren are:

  • "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."
  • "A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again."

When did Carl Clinton Van Doren live?

Carl Clinton Van Doren was born in 1885 and died in the year 1950.