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The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

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
Concentrates
Certainly
Approach
Death
Mind

More quotes by A. N. Wilson

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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.
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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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It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
A. N. Wilson
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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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Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
A. N. Wilson
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I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
A. N. Wilson
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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
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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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I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
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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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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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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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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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.
A. N. Wilson
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The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
A. N. Wilson
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Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
A. N. Wilson
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I don't write books inadvertently.
A. N. Wilson
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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.
A. N. Wilson