Edmund Wilson Quotes

Quotes about:

• No two persons ever read the same book.

  Edmund Wilson

  Inspirational, Book, Reading

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Truth, Stress, Play

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Education, Learning

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Ignorance, Taste

  Edmund Wilson (1951). “Memoirs of Hecate County”

  15 Copy quote

• If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

  Edmund Wilson

  Change, Dog, Poodles

  21 Copy quote

• I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.

  Edmund Wilson

  Hate, Paper, Fool

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Book

  1938 The Triple Thinkers, introduction.

  17 Copy quote

• Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.

  Edmund Wilson

  Night, Luminous, Keep Going

  14 Copy quote

• From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

  Edmund Wilson

  Real, Europe, Cities

  Edmund Wilson (1966). “Europe without Baedeker: sketches among the ruins of Italy, Greece and England, together with, Notes from a European diary, 1963-1964”, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Heart, Fire

  Edmund Wilson (2001). “I Thought of Daisy”, p.59, University of Iowa Press

  10 Copy quote

• There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

  Edmund Wilson

  Money, Income, Adequate

  Edmund Wilson (1951). “Memoirs of Hecate County”

  20 Copy quote

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

  Edmund Wilson

  Art, Appearance, Tricks

  Edmund Wilson (1951). “Memoirs of Hecate County”

  10 Copy quote

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

  Edmund Wilson

  Life, Inspire, Style

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Giving Up, Hands

  Edmund Wilson (1952). “The shores of light: a literary chronicle of the twenties and thirties”

  12 Copy quote

• The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

  Edmund Wilson

  Fall, Hands, Insult

  "Patriotic gore" by Edmund Wilson, (p. 115), 1962.

  11 Copy quote

• The only thing that we can really make is our work, and deliberate work of the mind, imagination and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, ‘notwithstanding,’ in the long run remakes the world.

  Edmund Wilson

  Running, Hands, Long

  Edmund Wilson, Lewis M. Dabney (1983). “The portable Edmund Wilson”, Viking Adult

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edmund Wilson

  Sex, Writing, Unattractive

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edmund Wilson

  Art, Believe, Giving

  Edmund Wilson (1997). “The Edmund Wilson Reader”

  12 Copy quote

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

  Edmund Wilson

  Country, Mistake, Europe

  Edmund Wilson, Edward J.N. Wilson (1983). “The Forties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period”

  10 Copy quote

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

  Edmund Wilson

  Lasts, Periods

  Edmund WIlson (1953). “To the Finland Station”

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Ideas, Drink

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Ideas, Advice

  10 Copy quote

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

  Edmund Wilson

  Elderly, Gout, Sometimes

  7 Copy quote

• Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

  Edmund Wilson

  Marxism, Opium

  Edmund Wilson, Edward J.N. Wilson (1983). “The Forties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period”

  60 Copy quote

• I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

  Edmund Wilson

  Kind, Poet

  Edmund Wilson (1990). “Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York”, p.4, Syracuse University Press

  4 Copy quote

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