Stark Young

"The history of any art is a history of man's states of mind and spirit, not of the objective world around him. To be ignorant of that is to be ignorant of the theater as an art, and leads to a mere muddle of resemblances and recognitions, a confusion between life and the theatre, contradictions about naturalness and artifice, and blindness to such ideas as require a new method or form to express them."

"The most valuable thing in my college Latin courses was that they were under a Virginian from the , whose belief in this was inherited and profound and therefore contagious."

"Stark Young was a man of protean interests in the arts. Because of this breadth of interest, it is arguable whether his main achievement was in fiction or in criticism, since he excelled in both, but after immersing myself in Young's critical writings in the theater, I have come to the conclusion that Young was the finest American critic on the art of the theatre of the first half of this century ..."