Edmund Wilson Quotes & Sayings

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society. — Edmund Wilson

Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night. — Edmund Wilson

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

No two person, ever read the same book. — Edmund Wilson

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

A young poet in America should not be advised at the outset to give up all for the Muse-to seclude himself in the country, to live hand from mouth in Greenwich Village or to escape to the Riviera. I should not advise him even to become a magazine editor or work in a publisher's office. The poet would do better to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies. — Edmund Wilson

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine. — Edmund Wilson

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

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind. — Edmund Wilson

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness. — Edmund Wilson

Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances. — Edmund Wilson

While the romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies, in the attempt to evade bourgeois society, and only succeeds in destroying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work. — Edmund Wilson

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. — Edmund Wilson

In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real. — Edmund Wilson

What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience. — Edmund Wilson

An acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time. — Edmund Wilson

If I could only keep up my spirit- if I could only play the game according to the sportsman's code which Rita had been trying to teach me so gravely and so sweetly- if I could only, I told myself, do that, then in the long run, all might be right between us- because I had not nagged her or wearied her, because I had proved myself her peer, as prompt to offer all for love and as brave to bear its passing. 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, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security! — Edmund Wilson

He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand. — Edmund Wilson

No two persons ever read the same book. — Edmund Wilson

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. — Edmund Wilson

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

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

Dan, who was writing a book on the radical activity of the twenties and thirties, took the occasion of our trip to ask me about them. The whole thing seems to me so stale that I can't imagine anybody's now wanting to write about it, but we ran over the personalities and I told him a lot of stories. It seemed to me like that grisly museum of the early 1900's that I had had him visit at Niagara Falls: old stuffed two-headed calves, motheaten panthers attacking a stag, dried-up corpses from Indian graves, big bags made of rubber tires in which people had tried to shoot the falls
and around it all-powerful industrial life that no show of resistance could stop, which had ruined the landscape of the river and was crowding out everything else. — Edmund Wilson

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas. — Edmund Wilson

At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout. — Edmund Wilson

No two persons every read the same book. — Edmund Wilson

All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely. — Edmund Wilson

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient. — Edmund Wilson

Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged. — Edmund Wilson

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg. — Edmund Wilson

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about. — Edmund Wilson

She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful. — Edmund Wilson

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

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income. — Edmund Wilson

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals — Edmund Wilson

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. — Edmund Wilson

It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history - and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing - that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people - the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand - in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years. — Edmund Wilson

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes. — Edmund Wilson