John Fowles Quotations

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

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

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

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

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.

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

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

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

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

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

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

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

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.

Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

So I felt this burning summer. In form I mightbelong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of aravenous self-destroying horde of rats.I am glad there is no God. If there were,I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic, andinsatiably self-centred creatures shouldbe allowed to survive a single day more

So I felt this burning summer. In form I might belong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of a ravenous self-destroying horde of rats. I am glad there is no God. If there were, I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic, and insatiably self-centred creatures should be allowed to survive a single day more

You are like a porcupine. When the animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.

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

I can see it is very far from being universally well written. I fell into almost every trap awaiting the tyro writer.

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet.

Between skin and skin, there is only light.

Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

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

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

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.

I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.

I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.

The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.

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

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

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.

If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always does to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them.

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.

The best wines take the longest to mature.

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

It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.

It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

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.

He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.

He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.

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.

The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.

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

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

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.

Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.

Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.

Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.

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 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.

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

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

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

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

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

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

There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.

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.

Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

Death is the room that is always empty.

We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

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

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

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

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.

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.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

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

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

even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects? It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women?and absurd.

We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.

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

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

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

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