Quotes from A. N. Wilson

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

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

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

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.

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.

I don't write books inadvertently.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A busybody's work is never done.

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