A. N. Wilson Quotes

I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past.

There's a good television programme called 'Disco 2.' It's quite good but again it's average, average. It's all on a down play. You know we've got this thing in England to be hip is to speak very down - like John Peel. And that just about sums up England. They don't realize when they talk like that, then that is what they represent - absolutely.

Be England what she will, with all her faults she is my country still.

I'm English, and I started off as a songwriter, so I can't really escape that - it's there.

Tis the hard grey weather Breeds hard English men.

England with all thy faults, I love thee still-- My country! and, while yet a nook is left Where English minds and manners may be found, Shall be constrained to love thee.

The thing with Disney songs is they're very manipulative, very sentimental, but they do get you, you know - there's a kind of sadness to them and that kind of music doesn't really exist any more.

A nation creates music. The composer only arranges it.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.

I shall yet live to see it an English nation.

All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals?

The history of a nation is not in Parliaments and battlefields but in what people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm and quarrel and go on pilgrimage.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

I don't really want the kind of Englishness that I have represented.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

I don't think anything's cruel - if you're so sensitive these days that you see cruelty everywhere, unfortunately every time a comedian comes on television, you're going to accuse him of cruelty, because that's the kind of humour that the English people enjoy.

Being English, being born in England, this is our home and we should be supporting our home country.

The only people who should play for England are English people.

It's unimaginable to meet a Pole or a German who does not know about the history of their country. But lots of English people don't know the difference between Britain and England.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

We like being English, but we're not that patriotic.

Bowen is a Welsh name and the family background is more rugby than football, but we're English through and through.

When people come to see you, they know what you do. That's what they want. They want it to be quite English; they don't want to watch an English bloke trying to fit in. They want it to be quintessentially English in the way that Ricky Gervais is rude to people at the Golden Globes.

If you've lived in England for five years, for me, it doesn't make you English.