John Fowles Writing Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.

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

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