"If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer."
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Quote collection
Colin Wilson quotes (page 3 of 3)
56 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings."
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"The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living."
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"The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say."
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"Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity."
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"I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept."
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"The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself."
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"A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors."
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"As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible"
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