"All good critics are frustrated writers. They are frustrated about the skill they are able to suggest so well because they work close to it without being of it. They are parallel to it and hence can see it in the most marvelous detail without being of it. I understand why Edmund [Wilson] works so hard at his journals. They are his living novel, his unending book of life."
~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook
