Raymond Williams on Colin Wilson

“The experience of the outsider (the feeling of separation, isolation, and personal or social frustration) is, of course, not rare, as Mr Wilson claims, but common, and even, in certain situations, normal. The resulting detachment will often produce valuable perceptions of the general life that is being observed. But, on communication, these perceptions will, quite properly, have to undergo the scrutiny of other men (including such other men as psychiatrists and sociologists, in spite of Mr Wilson's fashionably arrogant dismissal of them).”

“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.”