John Fowles Quotes

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

— John Fowles

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

— John Fowles

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”

— John Fowles

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.”

— John Fowles

“I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.”

— John Fowles

“The best wines take the longest to mature.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore.”

— John Fowles

“I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.

— John Fowles

“When she went out she used to wear a lot of eye shadow, which married with the sulky way she sometimes held her mouth to give her a characteristic bruised look; a look that subtly made one want to bruise her more.”

— John Fowles

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow.

— John Fowles

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

— John Fowles

“A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.”

— John Fowles

The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.

— John Fowles

“I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.”

— John Fowles

“I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman's house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.”

— John Fowles

“Victims?"
"Whatever you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice."
"That sounds like an excellent definition of man.”

— John Fowles

“Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself - a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to Sarah, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he hardly knew existed. He said it to himself: It is the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me. It seemed clear to him that it was not Sarah in herself who attracted him - how could she, he was betrothed - but some emotion, some possibility she symbolized. She made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She had reminded him of that.”

— John Fowles

“My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.”

— John Fowles

“Nice girl, dear boy."
"Oh ... " I shrugged. "You know."
"Most attractive."
"Cheaper than central heating."
"I'm sure.”

— John Fowles

“Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals.
Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce
determined to survive, whatever the cost.”

— John Fowles

“Let those love now who've never loved; let those who've loved, love yet again.”

— John Fowles

“Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write.”

— John Fowles

“Labor is a man crowning glory."
"Not this man's."
"I quote Marx"
I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.
"I quote blisters.”

— John Fowles

“That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.”

— John Fowles

“A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless ... speciesless.”

— John Fowles

“The feeling that he would probably betray me. And I've always thought of marriage as a sort of young adventure, two people of the same age setting out together, discovering together, growing together. But I would have nothing to tell him, nothing to show him. All the helping would be on his side.”

— John Fowles

Sex is just an activity, like anything else. It's not dirty, it's just two people playing with each other's bodies. Like dancing. Like a game.

— John Fowles

“Visitors to Lyme in the nineteenth century, if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal facing travellers to the ancient Greek colonies -Charles did not actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world news summary from the steps of the Town Hall- were certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to.”

— John Fowles

“The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.”

— John Fowles

Why should people have money if they don't know how to use it?

— John Fowles

“Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.”

— John Fowles

“The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.”

— John Fowles

Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles