"Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing"
About this Quote
Wilson is doing something sly here: he borrows Isaiah Berlin's elegant taxonomy, then uses it to preempt criticism of his own work. Calling yourself a "typical hedgehog" sounds humble, almost self-deprecating. It also functions as a manifesto. If you come to his books expecting the encyclopedic range of a fox, you'll miss the point; the repetition is the point. He's claiming the right to obsess.
Berlin's hedgehog/fox idea is usually deployed to classify great minds after the fact, as criticism. Wilson flips it into authorial intent. "I know just one thing" isn't an admission of narrowness so much as a bet on depth: that a single obsession can be mined indefinitely if you keep changing the angle of approach. The phrase "to make it look different" nods to the performative side of the project. He knows readers can confuse recurrence with stagnation, so he frames variation as craft rather than evasion.
The subtext is also about legitimacy. Wilson, associated with the postwar "Angry Young Men" moment and with outsider-intellectual status, often faced charges of grandiosity or monotony. This quote answers both: grandiosity is recast as focused inquiry; monotony becomes a disciplined return to first principles. By placing himself in the lineage of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky - not minor company - he elevates his method without having to brag outright.
Context matters: mid-20th-century literary culture prized novelty, experimentation, and range. Wilson argues for the opposite kind of ambition: the long, stubborn wrestle with a single question, dressed in new clothes each time, because the question still hasn't let him go.
Berlin's hedgehog/fox idea is usually deployed to classify great minds after the fact, as criticism. Wilson flips it into authorial intent. "I know just one thing" isn't an admission of narrowness so much as a bet on depth: that a single obsession can be mined indefinitely if you keep changing the angle of approach. The phrase "to make it look different" nods to the performative side of the project. He knows readers can confuse recurrence with stagnation, so he frames variation as craft rather than evasion.
The subtext is also about legitimacy. Wilson, associated with the postwar "Angry Young Men" moment and with outsider-intellectual status, often faced charges of grandiosity or monotony. This quote answers both: grandiosity is recast as focused inquiry; monotony becomes a disciplined return to first principles. By placing himself in the lineage of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky - not minor company - he elevates his method without having to brag outright.
Context matters: mid-20th-century literary culture prized novelty, experimentation, and range. Wilson argues for the opposite kind of ambition: the long, stubborn wrestle with a single question, dressed in new clothes each time, because the question still hasn't let him go.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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