DF Lewis

..Some of DFL's favourite fiction writers over the 59 years of his life:
Charles Dickens, HP Lovecraft, AS Byatt, Barbara Vine, Anita Brookner, WG Sebald, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Bowen, Stephen King, Marcel Proust, Paul Auster, Oliver Onions, John Fowles, Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Priest, John Cowper Powys, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Jack Vance, Philip K Dick, Thomas Ligotti, Tommaso Landolfi, Samuel R Delany, Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell, MR James, Robert Aickman, Sarban, Ramsey Campbell, Stefan Grabinski...


"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief." FROM "THE AREA" BY STEFAN GRABINSKI.


"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."..
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN


"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things - by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?"
from 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)