A. N. Wilson
A. N. Wilson
Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 October 1950
math insatiable-hunger awakening
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
sadness people joy
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.
fake-people teacher laptops
I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
liars believe angel
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.
writing thinking people
I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
father thinking catholic
I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
thinking people made
I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
dining-table tables austen
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
queens book writing
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
consciousness fear-of-death
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
dragons stories potters
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.
self upper-class towns
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.
vegetarian-diet suffering diets
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.
views newspapers
In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.