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 WilsonI 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 WilsonThe product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.
Edmund WilsonAt 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.
Edmund WilsonI 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 WilsonOnly 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 WilsonThey [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.
Edmund WilsonIt is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.
Edmund WilsonThe 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 WilsonIn times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.
Edmund WilsonHis style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
Edmund WilsonThe 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 WilsonIn a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.
Edmund WilsonThe human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
Edmund WilsonA 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 WilsonThe great mistake about Europe is taking the countries seriously and letting them quarrel and drop bombs on one another.
Edmund WilsonThe only thing that we can really make is our work, and deliberate work of the mind, imagination and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, โnotwithstanding,โ in the long run remakes the world.
Edmund WilsonOn the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.
Edmund Wilson