Edmund Wilson Quotes

I'm a horrible person. And it's just coming out in my work.

My strips are not always funny, and they can be pretty grim at times, and I know I lose readers because of it, but I can't do anything about it - my work is very much connected to something I need to do in order to feel stable.

I'm usually very critical of myself.

I never judge my own songwriting. It's just my heart. What's there to judge about your own heart?

I remember the first time I ever showed my parents a song that I had written. The content may have been a little darker than they were used to, or really introspective in a way that may have been uncomfortable. I thought they'd retaliate with some kind of judgment or concern about whether I was feeling all right, but they were proud of it.

I don't mind people liking or not liking me. If you make something and then in the back of your mind you think it could have been a bit better, that can hurt a bit.

I'm not good," he said, piercing me with eyes that absorbed all light but reflected none, "but I was worse.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.

When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.

I am pretty sick with myself! It seemed a pretty good idea at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I started to feel very creative, more creative than I had been before which is good and I like that.

There’s nothing more humbling than seeing your best quotes in a list, and thinking they could have been written by a coma patient with a keyboard and spasms.

The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.

I would feel really dishonest writing a song that was really sassy, or really confident, because I'm not a supremely confident being. I think that's what people find interesting about what I do; it's very different lyrically.

I hope I can improve. I'm far from perfect. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if I fought myself. I think it would be a one-round KO. But if I was fighting myself, I know I could take my best punch. No, make that two rounds. I would knock myself out in two rounds.

I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.

I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

Sometimes it helps to scold yourself, to give yourself advice.

I think that, right now, I am travelling in many different directions in my mind, on where I wanted to be. So much is wantin' to go back, but I still gotta move forward. But I think it's just that I'm my worst critic at all times, you know? And when I make somethin', it may be five or ten cuts later before I actually call it what it is. I've always been that kind of artist. I'm gonna put myself through the sweat for it, because I think, as an artist, that's what made me iller, is the fact that I didn't wanna just put out anything and everything. It's just a process, you know what I mean?

think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.

When I hear my first album today I hear myself reading my rhymes but I'm my worst critic.

She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

I can't believe that I've written my best work yet. If I believed that, then I wouldn't bother releasing music anymore.

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.