Top 50 A. N. Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A busybody’s work is never done.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

3. “The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don’t even have breakfast together.”

— A. N. Wilson

4. “I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.”

— A. N. Wilson

5. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

6. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

7. “The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.”

— A. N. Wilson

8. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

9. “Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

12. “It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.”

— A. N. Wilson

13. “My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known – not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.”

— A. N. Wilson

14. “We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.”

— A. N. Wilson

15. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

16. “I think that if you can’t be loyal to the Church, it’s best to get out.”

— A. N. Wilson

17. “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. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

20. “Hitler suffered acutely from meteorism; perhaps he did not suffer so acutely as those around him, since meteorism is uncontrolled farting, a condition exacerbated by Hitler’s strictly vegetarian diet.”

— A. N. Wilson

21. “History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

23. “In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned.”

— A. N. Wilson

24. “Anti-Semitism is extremely common.”

— A. N. Wilson

25. “In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.”

— A. N. Wilson

26. “I’m like Jane Austen – I work on the corner of the dining table.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

28. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

29. “I’m boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

32. “Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.”

— A. N. Wilson

33. “Everyone writes in Tolstoy’s shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.”

— A. N. Wilson

34. “Truth comes to us mediated by human love.”

— A. N. Wilson

35. “As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.”

— A. N. Wilson

36. “I don’t write books inadvertently.”

— A. N. Wilson

37. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

39. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

40. “I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.”

— A. N. Wilson

41. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

42. “I had lost faith in biography.”

— A. N. Wilson

43. “We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.”

— A. N. Wilson

44. “We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.”

— A. N. Wilson

45. “If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.”

— A. N. Wilson

46. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

47. “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.”

— A. N. Wilson

48. “I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.”

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson

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

— A. N. Wilson