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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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A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
Historian
Novelist
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Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman 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.
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I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
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The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
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Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
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One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing...When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat...and his army medals.
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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.
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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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Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
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The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
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In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
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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.
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As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.
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History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
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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 I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
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I had lost faith in biography.
A. N. Wilson
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I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.
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.
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My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
A. N. Wilson