John Fowles

I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.

If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view...

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum.

By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.

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

To my horror I began to cry...a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said “when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her...My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness...Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité.

She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.

"You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient."

"I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."

Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand.

He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…

I was not a poet. I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin.