Best 18 quotes of Malcolm Cowley on MyQuotes

Malcolm Cowley

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Age is not different from earlier life as long as you're sitting down

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    Malcolm Cowley

    A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it. But a citizen with a fixed place in the community wants to acquire a glorious past just as he acquires antique furniture. By that past he is reassured of his present importance; in it he finds strength to face the dangers that lie in front of him.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    I never cease to be amazed why some of my friends became famous and others, just as talented, didn't. I've come to suspect it's a matter of wanting fame or not, and those who don't want it, don't get it.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Put cotton in your ears and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant old age.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

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    Malcolm Cowley

    They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more.