John Fowles Quotes

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To c...

I want to tell you what's really happened.""Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and m...

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belong...

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any mor...

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemo...

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silen...

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, lo...

He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said abo...

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

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the ...

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, ce...

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame c...

If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; th...

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You h...

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuarie...

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and a...

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

A total stranger, and one not of one's sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.

...Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism...

Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determinat...

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love...

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways...

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 t...

M. I’ve never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She’s always been my mother...

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of ...

People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see t...

Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. Bu...

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personalit...

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just...

He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven...

I hate beyond hate.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight throug...

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people w...

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

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our rel...

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of li...

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

An answer is always a form of death.

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girl...

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, mem...

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metap...

I needed a new mystery.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.""I suppose one could say th...

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

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an atte...

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.""I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. ...

...there are times when silence is a poem.

She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.'You're bei...

Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm...

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that ...

Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle ...

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive ...

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

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attemp...

We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust...

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we diss...

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingen...

Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe i...

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'v...

It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can e...

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that ever...

I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my out...

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems ...

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

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its gui...

These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only cu...

Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind...

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. W...

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I ...

...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ T...

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate somet...

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what ...

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and ...

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actual...

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

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer ...

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at ...

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write wh...

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about t...

I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new class people with their cars and their money and thei...

Men love war because it allows them to look serious because it is the only thing that stops women l...

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move ...

I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for...

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

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobweb...

In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation th...

and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalc...

Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and subl...

I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in be...

A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (......

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.