Quote

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

A. N. Wilson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
Historian
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Books
Commissioned
Write
Stead
Book
Atlantic
Writing
Margaret
Kind
Victoria
Life
Publishers
Queen
Queens
Toby

More quotes by A. N. Wilson

Image
When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It's perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they'll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.
A. N. Wilson
Image
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
Image
I don't write books inadvertently.
A. N. Wilson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
A. N. Wilson
Image
I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
A. N. Wilson
Image
I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
A. N. Wilson
Image
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
A. N. Wilson
Image
It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
A. N. Wilson
Image
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
Image
In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
A. N. Wilson
Image
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
Image
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
A. N. Wilson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
A. N. Wilson
Image
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