Edmund Wilson Quotes

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

I always hate explaining away songs, because for me they mean something, and for other people, they'll mean something absolutely different.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

Nobody sees the same movie. I'm sure there are people who saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and thought "Finally a gay movie about men who really care about each other. Thank God!" That's not what I saw necessarily but I don't think any two people see the same movie.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

Art is interesting because there can be so many different perspectives in a piece of art. The way I see it may be completely different than the way somebody else sees it. It's interesting to hear what somebody sees in a piece of art compared to somebody else. It could be completely different, and that's interesting to me.

I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural.

I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.

My experience with 'Last Resort' is very different from most of the cast. While they are next to a mountain, I'm always within the four walls of my home.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

I have my own past and my own personality. I'm going to relate to the material in a completely different way than somebody else might.

I don't see things the way my parents do. They can look at a tree and see something amazing, whereas I just see a tree. That's not to say I don't appreciate its beauty. When I watch the sea in somewhere like Sardinia, I see the beauty in that.

Everyone's going to have their own experience and perspective on everything.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Somebody's going to hear a song that will key in a nerve or something in their experience that represents their own vision. And the next person is going to see it completely different. So even what it means to me is probably irrelevant. It's totally irrelevant. What matters is what it means to each person listening to it.

Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way a viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.