John Fowles Quotes

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.

The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.

The best wines take the longest to mature.

There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel." "I can feel." "No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine." "It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg — and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.