Quotes By A. N. Wilson

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The scribbler's life is never done.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

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

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.