Angus Wilson Quotes

#1. I opened the large central window of my office room to its full on the fine early May morning. Then I stood for a few moments, breathing in the soft, warm air that was charged with the scent of white lilacs below.

Angus Wilson

#2. You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get there.
Raspberry Jam

Angus Wilson

#3. The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

Angus Wilson

#4. The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

Angus Wilson

#5. People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms.

Angus Wilson

#6. All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery, a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.

Angus Wilson

#7. The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

Angus Wilson

#8. Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.

Angus Wilson

#9. The roots of art and play lie very close together.

Angus Wilson

#10. Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it.

Angus Wilson

#11. Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity.

Angus Wilson

#12. 'Youth is the time for loving, so poets always say.

Angus Wilson

#13. But you mustn't be too sane, darlings. It really won't do in this family.

Angus Wilson

#14. Fiction writing is a kind of magic. If I communicate the magic spell ... it loses its force for me.

Angus Wilson

#15. I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common.

Angus Wilson

#16. Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.

Angus Wilson

#17. Once a Catholic always a Catholic.

Angus Wilson

#18. Between Margaret's fine edged art and Glady's rough simplicity, where did the greater feminine solace lie? True art, after all, is simple.

Angus Wilson