“I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if
one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.”—Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), 1950 letter quoted in Marcel
Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Mann and His Family, "Thomas Mann—The Birth of
Criticism" (1987; translated 1989)
(Photograph of
Mann taken in April 1937 by Carl Van Vechten, now part of the Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection)
