Edmund Wilson Quotes

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.

My music was about travelling a lot and connecting with other people, and English is the voice of travelling.

Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.

I am South African and I am so aware, even as a white, privileged South African, that even within our community of privilege the idea of talking about sex or sexual preference or sexual identity or anything like that was just, nobody ever did that and nobody ever felt comfortable doing that.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

I think of language as our first music.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

Adjectives are the curse of America.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

Style means the right word. The rest matters little.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

Twenty to one offend more in writing too much than too little.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Writers have problems writing sex scenes, because writing one really well is pornography.

Sexuality is an expression of our spirituality. Sex makes you get real.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

Language is also a place of struggle.

People take sex far too seriously.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

Sexuality is, of course, a great way of having a conversation between people.