Colin Wilson

Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.

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

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

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 ones own potentialities.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

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

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.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change 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.

I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.

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

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

The complex develops out of the simple.

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

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.