Quotes By A. N. Wilson

I've got nothing very original to say myself.

I don't write books inadvertently.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 busybody's work is never done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I had lost faith in biography.

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.

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.

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 wanted passionately to be a priest.