A. N. Wilson Quotations

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.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

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.

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.

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.

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.

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.

On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.

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.

The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.

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.

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.

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.

It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.

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.

I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

Truth comes to us mediated by human love.

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.

Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.

I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.

I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.

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.

The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.

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.

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.

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.

I've got nothing very original to say myself.

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.

I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

I'm starting to realize that people are beginning to want to know about me. It's a jolly strange idea.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

Like many people in Britain, I have an affectionate respect for the Queen, and am surprised that I should be having such republican thoughts.

People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.

I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.

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.

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.

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.

We're getting a million hits a day on our site,

What we're doing right now feels like we're going in the right direction. I need to face hitters and all that stuff, but we're going fast and at the same time we're really just taking it day-to-day. When you start making schedules and having to meet deadlines, then we're really not listening to what my arm is saying.

We're looking to see if there are any cases that have the signs and symptoms associated with RPLS.

This proposed condemnation may be the most extreme abuse of eminent domain in the country.

Leave it to others to be perfect, to be wonderful. Be content with what you are.

She was a natural leader, ... You know when there's a group, somebody always seems to be a leader? She was that.

One is that we have 133,000 more potential targets out there, a lot closer to where harm can happen, that we've created another front for terrorism that we're now in the midst of.

He was a poor coach when it came to looking after a group of people,

He doesn't beat around the bush. It's refreshing how he's not worried about being politically correct.

His opinion seemed to form pretty quickly that this group is not responding so we'll have to look elsewhere, so they searched for interstate players and by and large they failed.

I thought we would play better. I don't know if it's the stigma about their personnel, the status of what they've got. I don't know if that affects us or not. We feel like we can play with them, yet it hasn't happened.

I think the people we are counting on to step up will be ready to go.

It goes back to the (fact that the) market is confused. This will be the best looking earnings report of the quarter of any builder.

Kyle has the right demeanor where he can focus on what he has to focus on. He's not afraid to speak up at all. It's hard to distinguish between what is really good advice and when somebody is just trying to help their own position out. He knows that.

People have a tendency to regurgitate whatever they've last heard and to give equal credence to untruths as they do to truths.

Someone at the federal level should have that authority.

Most intelligence reports are naturally regarded with healthy skepticism until they're vetted and looked into.

You'd like to have (experience), but it's not necessary. The biggest thing we have is having the home game because going on the road and being inexperienced can be more difficult. But you can do it on the road, too, with no experience. I thought the whole experience thing was overrated, but I just wanted to play.

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.

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.

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.

In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.

As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.

I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.

I wanted passionately to be a priest.

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.

We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.

Anti-Semitism is extremely common.

I don't write books inadvertently.

I had lost faith in biography.

History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.

In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

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 busybody's work is never done.

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.

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.

One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing...When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat...and his army medals.

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.

We don't need another Teflon-like hidden risk at DuPont.

We were told to be aggressive. That's the way a lot of our hitters hit. We didn't have a lot of guys that walked. No one ever had a problem with it.

We are excited to have John attend the event, ... It gives local people an opportunity to meet him in an informal setting and getting to know John is getting to appreciate what an outstanding premier he can be for our province.

We felt that in light of the devastating effects Hurricane Katrina had on the Gulf Coast just three weeks ago, it was in the best interest of our residents and staff to call for an evacuation to a more inland location.

We should have played better early on, but we just weren't aggressive. We let them change our strategy, and we shouldn't have allowed that. We had a hard time being patient. We could have played a lot better.

First of all, I had been retired for several years from government.

The whole key for us is to weather the storm of the first four minutes. We have to keep our composure and the good thing is that a lot of people will be cheering for the underdog against a traditional power.