Quotes from Colin Wilson

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask "What the hell is wrong with the projector?" and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.

The mentally healthy individual is he who habitually calls upon fairly deep levels of vital reserves. An individual whose mind is allowed to become dormant - so that only the surface is disturbed - begins to suffer from'circulation problems'. Neurosis is the feeling of being cut off from your own powers.

This is one of the most urgent problems for civilized man. He has created civilization to give him security. Security for what? For boredom? His chief problem seems to be that most human beings need a certain amount of challenge, of external stimulus, to stop them from sinking into the blank stare and blank consciousness of the idiot.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an "I", but it is not his true "I".' His main business is to find his way back to himself.

Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well.

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money.

It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is the agent that ensures happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.

Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

Imagination should be used not to escape reality, but to create it.

Human intelligence is a function of man's evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.