Edmund Wilson Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Edmund Wilson
The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

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

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

Edmund Wilson
Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country, it is always to liberate somebody.

Edmund Wilson
Of Gertrude Stein:
Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature— and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read.

Edmund Wilson
I attribute such success as I have had to the use of the periodic sentence.

Edmund Wilson
The wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of a sea slug.

Edmund Wilson
Miami is … of unimaginable awfulness—much like other American seaside resorts but on an unprecedented scale: acres of cheap white shops, mountain ranges of white hotels.

Edmund Wilson
In the arts as in the sciences a certain freedom for experimentation is necessary: one must allow a good deal of apparently gratuitous, and even empty or ridiculous work, if one wants to get masterpieces.

Edmund Wilson
I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions—while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers—in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral. Here the body purges itself, and along with the body, the spirit.

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

Edmund Wilson
We tended to imagine Canada as a kind of vast hunting preserve convenient to the United States.

Edmund Wilson
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
Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.

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