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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
Teacher
Writer
Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Might
Research
Firsts
Hope
First
Else
Done
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Life
Stills
Dons
People
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Today
Suppose
Anything
Brilliant

More quotes by A. N. Wilson

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The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
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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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I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
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The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
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I wanted passionately to be a priest.
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History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
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
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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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My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
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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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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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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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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
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I had lost faith in biography.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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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.
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.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
A. N. Wilson
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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
A. N. Wilson