Colin Wilson Quotes

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

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

If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?

Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.

Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

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

When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.

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.

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.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

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.

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

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

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

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.

Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.

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

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

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

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.

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

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.

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

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

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

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.

The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.