Edmund Wilson

"He was the perfect autodidact. He wanted to know it all."

"Wilson is not like other critics; some critics are boring even when they are original; he fascinates even when he is wrong."

"There is really no way of considering a book independently of ones special sensations in reading it on a particular occasion. In this as in everything else one must allow a certain relativity. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice."

"Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods."

"Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals."

"Im furious at the critical attitude toward Carl Sandburg! Its largely the work of "Bunny" Wilson, who was far from being the critic hes supposed to be. He was a very small-minded, petty, jealous, mean man and a stinker of the first order, and if Im saying those words for all eternity, I mean them. He hated Carl. He wrote a review of Carls enormous Lincoln which was contemptuous, demeaning, belittling, and, as for Carls being a poet, he disposed of that in a couple of well-chosen sentences."

"It may be that there is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income."

"He was, as painted, aristocratic, beyond any writer Ive met, but in a Jeffersonian-American way that brooked no artificial distinctions. There was no cheap way you could impress him... It was a particular strength of his as a critic that he was not even impressed by the Dead as such. He could write of living authors in precisely the same tones, and applying the same standards, as he used for the Classics."