"In practice, a great part of the more valuable descriptions of the outsider's situation, and of his ways of seeing, has come, on Mr Wilson's own evidence, from men who have ceased to be outsiders, in the simple sense; men who, in spite of everything, have accepted 'human life lived by human beings in a human society', leaving behind them records alike of the tension and the despair, and of the hard-won terms of acceptance. The phases of ratification and communication are, in terms of literature, virtually indispensable, and Mr Wilson's simple concept would need radical modification to be adequate to the diversity and complexity of such experience."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Fantasy authorsNovelists from EnglandPlaywrights from EnglandShort story writers from EnglandNon-fiction authors from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was a British writer, known for his first book The Outsider and over one hundred other books, including seventeen novels and many works in criminology, existential philosophy, psychology, religion, the occult, mysticism, wine, and music.
189 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Colin Wilson →
Related Quotes
"The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet th…"
"The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider."
"What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality."
"Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois…"
"Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its …"
"I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for …"
"The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. On…"
"No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a pure…"
"Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians w…"
"The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint."