Quotes by Colin Wilson

Oh . . . Id been getting pretty sick of the office. It made me feel dead inside. Finally, the week-ends werent long enough to get it out of my system. I couldnt read poetry or listen to music. It was like being constipated. Well, I got a holiday and went to Kent for a weeks hiking. And for the first two days I felt nothing at all, just a sort of deadness inside. And one day I went into a pub in a place called Marden and had a couple of pints. And as I came out, a sort of bubble seemed to burst inside me, and I started feeling things again. And I suddenly felt an overwhelming hatred for cities and offices and people and everything that calls itself civilisation . . . . Then I got an idea. I sat down at the side of the road and thought about it. Id read somewhere that the Manichees thought the world was created by evil. Well, it suddenly seemed to me that the forces behind the world werent either good or evil, but something quite incomprehensible to human beings. And the only thing they want is movement, everlasting movement. Thats the way I saw it suddenly. Human beings want peace, and they build their civilisations and make their laws to get peace. But the forces behind the world dont want peace. So they send down ertain men whose business is to keep the world in a turmoil - the Napoleons, Hitlers, Genghis Khans. And I called these men the Enemies, with a capital E. And I thought I belong among the Enemies - thats why I detest this bloody civilisation. And I suddenly began to feel better . . . .

The cultural problem was the fallacy of insignificance, and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.

As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible

These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.

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