Edmund Wilson
15 quotes
Biography
"There is really no way of considering a book independently of one's special sensations in reading it on a particular occasion. In this as in everything else one must allow a certain relativity. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice."
"Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods."
"It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income."
"Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals."
"The more I have thought about Figures of Earth — and its sequel The Silver Stallion — the more remarkable they have come to seem. Looking back, one can now understand the abrupt fluctuations of Cabell's fame. … Published when Cabell was forty-two, the chronicle of Manuel the Redeemer was not a book for the Young nor was it a book in the mood of the twenties. The story of the ambitious man of action who is cowardly, malignant and treacherous and who does not even enjoy very much what his crimes and double-dealing have won him, but who is rapidly, after his death, transformed into a great leader, a public benefactor and a saint, has the fatal disadvantage for a novel that the reader finds no inducement to identify himself with its central figure. Yet I am now not sure that this merciless chronicle in which all the values are negative except the naked human will, is not one of the best things of its kind in literature — on a plane, perhaps, with Flaubert and Swift."
"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."
"I'm furious at the critical attitude toward Carl Sandburg! It's largely the work of "Bunny" Wilson, who was far from being the critic he's supposed to be. He was a very small-minded, petty, jealous, mean man and a stinker of the first order, and if I'm saying those words for all eternity, I mean them. He hated Carl. He wrote a review of Carl's enormous Lincoln which was contemptuous, demeaning, belittling, and, as for Carl's being a poet, he disposed of that in a couple of well-chosen sentences."
"He was the perfect autodidact. He wanted to know it all."
"Wilson is not like other critics; some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong."
"The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society."
"The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination."
"No two person, ever read the same book."
"I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about."
"What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience."
"I think with my right hand."