“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”

English novelist

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist, active in the twentieth century, whose work is often placed between modernism and postmodernism. He is known for fiction shaped by philosophical concerns and by the influence of writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His novels are associated with ideas of choice, freedom, and uncertainty, and with a style that looks back to modernist writing while also moving toward postmodern methods. He remains widely read for that blend of intellectual seriousness and narrative experimentation.