Top 35 Edmund Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No two persons ever read the same book.”

— Edmund Wilson

2. “If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.”

— Edmund Wilson

3. “Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.”

— Edmund Wilson

4. “Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.”

— Edmund Wilson

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.”

— Edmund Wilson

8. “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

9. “Old-fogyism is comfortably closing in.”

— Edmund Wilson

10. “The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations – like that of artistic imagination.”

— Edmund Wilson

11. “All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely.”

— Edmund Wilson

12. “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

13. “I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.”

— Edmund Wilson

14. “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

15. “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

16. “There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.”

— Edmund Wilson

17. “Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.”

— Edmund Wilson

18. “No hay dos personas que lean el mismo libro.”

— Edmund Wilson

19. “Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.”

— Edmund Wilson

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.”

— Edmund Wilson

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

— Edmund Wilson

25. “I really can’t stand any more to pay for a burst of animation when someone comes in for drinks with a depressed and low-keyed next day, in which I have to go around on my hands and knees.”

— Edmund Wilson

26. “What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.”

— Edmund Wilson

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Edmund Wilson

30. “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

31. “I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.”

— Edmund Wilson

32. “I think with my right hand.”

— Edmund Wilson

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

— Edmund Wilson

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

— Edmund Wilson

35. “No two people will ever read the same book in the same way.” -.”

— Edmund Wilson