“What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.”
Edmund Wilson“I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.”
Edmund Wilson“Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination“Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.”
Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump“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.”
Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930