Burton Rascoe

"American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of A…"

"It is true, of course, that like the fruit of the tree of life, Mr. Cabell's artistic progeny sprang from a first conceptual germ — "In the beginning was the Word." That animating idea is the assumpti…"

"A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life — what people are interested in. That's journalism."

"I felt exactly like the man in the advertisement who has not devoted fifteen minutes a day to the study of the classics. If only I had devoted fifteen minutes a day to the cultivation of the aesthetic…"

"What no wife of a writer can ever understand, no matter if she lives with him for twenty years, is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window."

"When H. L. Mencken unpacks his idiomatic brasses, tunes up his verbal strings, and gets in readiness his phrasal wood winds to orchestrate a fugue in damnation or in praise of man, god or book, his al…"

"I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing."

"Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting human…"