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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
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A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
Historian
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Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Intellectual
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Universities
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Guarantee
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Academics
More quotes by A. N. Wilson
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
We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.
A. N. Wilson
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
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
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
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
I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
A. N. Wilson
A busybody's work is never done.
A. N. Wilson
I had lost faith in biography.
A. N. Wilson
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
Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
A. N. Wilson
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
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
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
I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.
A. N. Wilson
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
A. N. Wilson
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
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
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
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
