Quotes by Edmund Wilson

“No two person, ever read the same book.”

“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...”

“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.”

“No two persons ever read the same book.”

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

“I think with my right hand.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“I believe, that certain people — especially, perhaps, in Britain — have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. … You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: th...”

“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 Cab...”

“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 pa...”

“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, ...”

“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 letter...”

“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.”