Angus Wilson

"God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction," she said. "It's different with us, I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sin on my conscience, but I know when I'm doing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me." "Of course, duckie," said Jeremy... "once a Catholic always a Catholic."

"The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times."

"People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms."

"All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special."

"In writing novels I have never been able to place much importance upon the distinction between real and imagined. A novelist, it seems to me, makes as much or as little use of the real world as he needs to project his vision of life."

"[T]he impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life."

"The roots of art and play lie very close together."

"Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it."

"Between Margaret's fine-edged art and Gladys's rough simplicity, where did the greater feminine solace lie? True art, after all, is simple."

"Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity."

"But you mustn't be too sane, darlings. It really won't do in this family."

"I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common."

"April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter, and the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears, April."

"Youth is the time for loving, So poets often say."

"His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers."

"When was reviewing Doris Lessing's last two books from the Shikasta series, I found that she has discovered what I, to my great joy, had discovered a little earlier: that (a) if you're writing what they call science fiction, you're absolutely free-you can write anything you damn please, and (b) that if you take seriously the science fiction premise, you are furnished with an inexhaustable supply of absolutely beautiful and complex metaphors for our present situation, for who and where we are now, and I think it's not only women who have found this out. Angus Wilson was one of the first to do this with The Old Man in the Zoo years ago. That is a science fiction novel, if you look at it closely."

"Angus Wilson says in Wild Garden that most of his books begin with a visual image; one of them began when he saw these two people arguing and he had to find out what they were arguing about, who they were. That fits in beautifully with the kind of visual image that started The Left Hand of Darkness."