A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
Bernard DeVotoBetween the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
Bernard DeVotoThe achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
Bernard DeVotoThe trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
Bernard DeVoto