Quotes from Edmund Wilson

No two persons ever read the same book. -Edmund Wilson

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!

when his drinking had cost him discharge from the Army. He had known it again after Shiloh, that uncoordinated

to shelve him. At

phase, before the restoration of epaulettes. And in Grant there was a genuine diffidence.

All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely.

In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

No two person, ever read the same book.

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

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

I think with my right hand.

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.

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.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

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.

No two people read the same book.

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.