John Fowles

"The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity...they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard t…"

"She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t …"

"A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat — a midget ball of feathers th…"

"The New York Times obituary of John Fowles"

"A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to hav…"

"I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I k…"

"There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour.."

"In a vivid Insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was…"