John Fowles

"Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity."

"I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it wa…"

"Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?"

"I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might a…"

"Fair or Fowles? – Interview with John Fowles at The Guardian"

"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…"

"...even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of…"

"Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want."