Louis Kronenberger

Critic

1904-12-09 – 1980-04-30

Louis Kronenberger was an American literary critic, novelist, and biographer known for his long tenure at Time magazine. He wrote extensively on drama and 18th-century cultural subjects.

Quotes by Louis Kronenberger

The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.
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Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.
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Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
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The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.
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Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
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The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.
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Art, for most Americans, is a very queer fish-it can't be reasoned with, it can't be bribed, it can't be doped out or duplicated; above all, it can't be cashed in on.
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The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.
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Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.
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Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.
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This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.
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He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.
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Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.
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Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.
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In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.
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For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.
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One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds: the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counterfetishism.
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Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.
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Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.
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Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go puffing up and, later, of shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of banisters.
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