Quotes By A. N. Wilson

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

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

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.

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.

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

A busybody's work is never done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The scribbler's life is never done.

I wanted passionately to be a priest.

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.