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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
Novelist
Teacher
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Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Rather
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Guarantees
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University
Academics
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More quotes by A. N. Wilson

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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.
A. N. Wilson
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In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
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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.
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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
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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.
A. N. Wilson
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I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
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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I don't write books inadvertently.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
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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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
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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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Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
A. N. Wilson
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I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
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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I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
A. N. Wilson
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Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
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