Colin Wilson Quotes.
I’ve always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
I’m basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren’t interested in ideas. The English, I’m afraid, are totally brainless.
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
If I’d stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.
The complex develops out of the simple.
The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain.
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can’t get out of.
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation.
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it’s a desire to be possessed.
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.
Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.
The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.
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.
Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that “the world” would decline to recognize them.
Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.
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.
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
