Edmund Wilson Quotes
1895 - 1972
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It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) [New York Review Books Classics, 2004], Ch. 4, p. 136 
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More Edmund Wilson Quotes
You must invent because you enjoy it.
Edmund Wilson— 2004 On making his first recumbent bicycle in1955. US literary critic, social commentator, and novelist. Although his own fiction, plays and poems are now little read, he was an influential critic with a wide-ranging perspective on art, history and society.
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— 1938 TheTripleThinkers, introduction.
Of all the great Victorian writers, he was probably the most antagonistic to theVictorian age itself.
Edmund Wilson— 1941 Of Dickens.TheWound and the Bow,'Dickens:TheTwo Scrooges'.
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— The Triple Thinkers (1938) [Oxford University Press, 1948], Preface, p. ix
Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.
Edmund Wilson— To the Finland Station (1940) [Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1972, ISBN 374-51045-8/1145], Part I, Ch. 5: Michelet Between Nationalism and Socialism, p. 36
Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
Edmund Wilson— Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) [New York Review Books Classics, 2004], Ch. 5, p. 340
— Karl Marx, in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843-4), wrote "Religion…is the opium of the people" ("Die Religion…ist das Opium des Volkes"). Wilson was not the first writer to turn Marx’s statement on its head: Evelyn Waugh published a review of Harold Laski's Faith, Reason and Civilization in The Tablet, 22nd April 1944, under the headline "Marxism, the Opiate of the People".
— In 1955 the French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote a book on Marxism called L'Opium des intellectuels. Hence Wilson's line is often attributed to him.
He was the perfect autodidact. He wanted to know it all.
Edmund Wilson— Gore Vidal, "Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes," The New York Review of Books (1980-09-25), later published in The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976-1982 (1982) [Vintage, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71379-6], p. 32
Wilson is not like other critics; some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong.
Edmund Wilson— Alfred Kazin, in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature (HarperCollins, 1991), p. 1146
