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

A. N. Wilson

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A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
Historian
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Persons
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Objective
Writing
Novels
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Thinking
Novel
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Write
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Truth

More quotes by A. N. Wilson

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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
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I don't write books inadvertently.
A. N. Wilson
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In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
A. N. Wilson
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This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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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.
A. N. Wilson
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I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.
A. N. Wilson
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I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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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
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I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
A. N. Wilson
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We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
A. N. Wilson
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It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
A. N. Wilson