Edmund Wilson

“Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.”

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

“He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.”

“No two person, ever read the same book.”

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

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

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

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

“No two persons ever read the same book.”

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

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

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

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