John Fowles Quotes

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.

— John Fowles

One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.”

— John Fowles

“The profoundest distances are never geographical.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

— John Fowles

“Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.”

— John Fowles

“He is the same, but everything is different.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I'm not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) 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.”

— John Fowles

“I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.”

— John Fowles

“She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.”

— John Fowles

“What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness.”

— John Fowles

“It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.”

— John Fowles

“Ever read this?"
"Let's cut corners. To hell with literature. You're clever and I'm beautiful. Now let's talk about who we really are.”

— John Fowles

“Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness.”

— John Fowles

“Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.”

— John Fowles

“I've been sitting here and thinking about God. I don't think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn't intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can't hear. There's nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can't care about the individuals. He's planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn't know, and he doesn't care. So he doesn't exist, really.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight-and smile at your own past sorrows.”

— John Fowles

“When you love me, it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.”

— John Fowles

“I felt like a germ that had landed, like the first penicillin microbe, not only in a culture where it was totally at home, totally nourished; but in a situation in which it was infinitely significant.”

— John Fowles

“She had only a candle's light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman.”

— John Fowles

“The stairs were certainly steep; and in those days, when they could rarely see their own feet, women were always falling; it was a commonplace of domestic life.”

— John Fowles

“Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."
She shifted her head, not understanding.
I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.”

— John Fowles

“I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him. His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives; the people he loves always remember him.
I've always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what he would be like in bed. I look at their mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed.
Even Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles