COLIN WILSON

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.

Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.

Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

The complex develops out of the simple.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation.

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

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.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings, has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will; for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's objective.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.