Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilsonwas an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, andpurpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 June 1931
ask control hell life miller says seems wrong
Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask "What the hell is wrong with the projector?" and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.
afraid concerned far interested main problems public tend typecast understood writer
One of my main problems as far as the public is concerned is that I've always been interested in too many things, ... and if they can't typecast you as a writer on this or that, then I'm afraid you tend not to be understood at all.
rain men average
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
reality imagination should
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
strong men garden
I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.
light easy knows
Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.
ideas philadelphia america
The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.
too-much kind laurels
Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.
two trying different
Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.
want outsiders driving
Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.
taken optimistic men
Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. its aim like that of science was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.
eye views bird
When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view
morning eye world
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.
party london ifs
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.