Words matter. These are the best A. N. Wilson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
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.
I’m starting to realize that people are beginning to want to know about me. It’s a jolly strange idea.
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.
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.
The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
I’m boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It’s perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they’ll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
I had lost faith in biography.
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.
I suppose if I’d got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.
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.
IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.
It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue – but I would argue it nevertheless – that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music – both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing – is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
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.
It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
I don’t think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That’s why people write novels.
The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: ‘Moby-Dick.’
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness – perhaps unimaginative of me.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
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.
