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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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A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
Historian
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Dead
Abbey
Alone
Powerfully
Speak
Tourists
Without
Vivid
Many
Queens
Kings
Perspective
Westminster
Thoughts
Eerie

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I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't write books inadvertently.
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The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
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We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.
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I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
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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.
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I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
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It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
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Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
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Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
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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.
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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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