Edmund Wilson Quotes

Edmund Wilson shares witty, incisive reflections on reading and criticism, great for those who enjoy clever, thought-provoking literary commentary.

24 quotes

1. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

2. Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.

3. It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

4. Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

5. He was, as painted, aristocratic, beyond any writer I've met, but in a Jeffersonian-American way that brooked no artificial distinctions. There was no cheap way you could impress him... It was a particular strength of his as a critic that he was not even impressed by the Dead as such. He could write of living authors in precisely the same tones, and applying the same standards, as he used for the Classics.

6. Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.

7. He was the perfect autodidact. He wanted to know it all.

8. Wilson is not like other critics; some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong.

9. I think with my right hand.

10. Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

11. Old-fogyism is comfortably closing in.

12. On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.

13. No two people read the same book.

14. The Jew lends himself easily to Communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew.

15. The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

16. No two persons ever read the same book.

17. If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

18. It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.

19. The great mistake about Europe is taking the countries seriously and letting them quarrel and drop bombs on one another.

20. In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

21. The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.

22. One didn't really believe till one saw it demonstrated that giving oneself up completely to art, to emotion, to enjoyment, without planning for the future or counting the cost, produced dreadful disabilities and bankruptcies later.

23. His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

24. Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.