Edmund Wilson Quotes

At 66, you're supposed to die or get hemorrhoids.

What happens at 90 is that I don't walk so good, my eyes are going, I can't hear well, and I'm getting all of the 90s residuals.

When you're at the wrong end of your 70s, everything is a challenge.

If you fight sex, sex becomes the center. Then, continuously, you are engaged in it, occupied with it. It becomes like a wound. And wherever you look, that wound immediately projects, and whatsoever you see becomes sexual.

The sexual act - thinking about the sexual act, the telling about the sexual act, after the sexual act, is so much more important than the actual sexual act - just in time. It's like of the whole sexual act, you probably spend 95% of the time thinking about it, talking about it afterwards. The actually sexual act, especially when you're 17, is minutes.

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.

The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

Furthermore, [Sigmund Freud] had a racial fixation on sex, a fixation sufficiently pronounced to cause it to infect contagiously all modern European stock.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

Eighty is when you order a steak and the headwaiter puts it through the blender. Or when you wake up as many times during the night as Burt Reynolds, but not for the same reason.

I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.

Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.

I'm just really old [in Doctor Strange]. Just really, really old. There is I suppose a sort of theme tune which I'm really interested in.

There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts as if we'd all been weaned too soon.

I'm an old man at 54, without teeth, and with rheumatism.

Two bats were hanging up in a cave and one said to the other, 'When I'm older, I hope I don't become incontinent'.

Fanatics have the look of people who do not masturbate but who think about it almost all time.

Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.

There are many rules for the elderly in the Highway Code. I have one too, and here it is: get a bloody move on.

Growing old is not a thing to watch. It cannot be forgiven in others. Alone, it can be borne. Even indulged.

In my opinion, everybody is getting older and older. We have a great deal of dementia because nobody grew old enough to get it.

It’s a curse, really,” Lady Danbury said. “I’m the only person I know my age who has perfect hearing.” “Most would call that a blessing.” She snorted. “Not with that musicale looming over the horizon.

Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.