Top 70 A. N. Wilson Quotes
#1. IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.
A. N. Wilson
#2. 'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.
A. N. Wilson
#3. Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
A. N. Wilson
#5. Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.
A. N. Wilson
#6. I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
A. N. Wilson
#7. We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
A. N. Wilson
#8. If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
A. N. Wilson
#9. It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black.
A. N. Wilson
#10. It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
A. N. Wilson
#11. I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
A. N. Wilson
#12. As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.
A. N. Wilson
#13. This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.
A. N. Wilson
#14. Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
A. N. Wilson
#15. I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
A. N. Wilson
#16. If only Queen Elizabeth II had the intellectual, political and linguistic skills of Queen Elizabeth I, many people would support giving her some of the powers of an elected president.
A. N. Wilson
#17. I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
A. N. Wilson
#18. The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
A. N. Wilson
#19. The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
A. N. Wilson
#20. I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
A. N. Wilson
#21. It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
A. N. Wilson
#23. If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that ... but I have published slightly too much recently.
A. N. Wilson
#24. I once asked Lady Moseley what she found so beguiling about Hitler's conversation. 'Oh, the jokes', she said at once.
A. N. Wilson
#25. Hitler suffered acutely from meteorism; perhaps he did not suffer so acutely as those around him, since meteorism is uncontrolled farting, a condition exacerbated by Hitler's strictly vegetarian diet.
A. N. Wilson
#26. Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.
A. N. Wilson
#28. The extreme paradox arose that one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived was paraded before the public as a stiff, pompous little person, the 'figurehead' to an all-male imperial enterprise. This
A. N. Wilson
#30. Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.
A. N. Wilson
#31. I've got nothing very original to say myself.
A. N. Wilson
#32. I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.
A. N. Wilson
#33. My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.
A. N. Wilson
#34. It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.
A. N. Wilson
#35. I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
A. N. Wilson
#36. We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.
A. N. Wilson
#37. My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
A. N. Wilson
#38. When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
A. N. Wilson
#39. Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations.
A. N. Wilson
#40. Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
A. N. Wilson
#41. Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
A. N. Wilson
#42. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off 'Thought for the Day' when it comes on the radio.
A. N. Wilson
#43. Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
A. N. Wilson
#44. In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
A. N. Wilson
#45. [..] when a friendship has become a matter of arranging to meet, dates in diaries, agreement that next week or the next are 'no good', then it has been silently acknowledged that the old intimacy has gone.
A. N. Wilson
#46. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
A. N. Wilson
#47. The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.
A. N. Wilson
#48. I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
A. N. Wilson
#49. If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
A. N. Wilson
#50. The monarchy, as Lord Esher, adviser to Edward VII and editor of Queen Victoria's early letters and journals, would later say, was exchanging 'authority' for 'influence'.3
A. N. Wilson
#51. In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity
or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity
by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
A. N. Wilson
#52. There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II - the first computer it produced for the mass market - many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen.
A. N. Wilson
#53. Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
A. N. Wilson
#54. The death of any man aged 56 is very sad for his widow and family. And no one would deny that Steve Jobs was a brilliant and highly innovative technician, with great business flair and marketing ability.
A. N. Wilson
#55. I'm starting to realize that people are beginning to want to know about me. It's a jolly strange idea.
A. N. Wilson
#57. It is the woman - nearly always - in spite of all the advances of modern feminism, who still takes responsibility for the bulk of the chores, as well as doing her paid job. This is true even in households where men try to be unselfish and to do their share.
A. N. Wilson
#58. Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
A. N. Wilson
#59. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter,' that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.
A. N. Wilson
#60. We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.
A. N. Wilson
#61. The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.
A. N. Wilson
#62. Like many people in Britain, I have an affectionate respect for the Queen, and am surprised that I should be having such republican thoughts.
A. N. Wilson
#63. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
A. N. Wilson
#64. The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
A. N. Wilson
#65. History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
A. N. Wilson
#66. I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.
A. N. Wilson
#68. I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
A. N. Wilson
#69. The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
A. N. Wilson
#70. Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
A. N. Wilson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
