120 Quotes by Colin Wilson

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.

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

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person – because as soon as we look in one another’s faces we can see the other point of view.

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can’t get out of.

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

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.

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

The “passion for incredulity” can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

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.