John Fowles Quotes

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”

— John Fowles

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.

— John Fowles

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”

— John Fowles

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

— John Fowles

“The world began in hazard and will end in it.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. 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.

— John Fowles

“You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”

— John Fowles

“All cynicism masks a failure to cope.”

— John Fowles

“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”

— John Fowles

It's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.

— John Fowles

“You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.”

— John Fowles

Oh,clever ... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.”

— John Fowles

“I am Mrs. Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master."
"His Infinitude has been informed of your decease, ma'am. His angels have already sung a Jubilate in celebration of the event."
"That is most proper and kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler's head. But the man did not move aside. Instead, he rather impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand.
"My man! Make way. I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis."
"Formerly of Lyme Regis, ma'am. And now of a much more tropical abode."
With that, the brutal flunkey slammed the door in her face.”

— John Fowles

Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that the joy in the day and the passing of the day are inseparable. What makes our existence worthwhile is precisely that its worth and its while - its quality and duration - are as impossible to unravel as time and space in mathematics of relativity.

— John Fowles

“She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery ... she said, Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you.”

— John Fowles

“Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.”

— John Fowles

“The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.”

— John Fowles

“When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.”

— John Fowles

“And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.”

— John Fowles

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.

— John Fowles

“Utram bibis?Aquam an undam?”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“He stared to sea. I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover - that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.”

— John Fowles

“Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.”

— John Fowles

“I know I can't do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who'll betray me. I feel it.”

— John Fowles

“If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.”

— John Fowles

“All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart, too.”

— John Fowles

“Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.”

— John Fowles

“Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal.”

— John Fowles

“One writes things and the implications shriek- it's like suddenly realizing one's deaf.”

— John Fowles

“This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.
All in vain. All wasted.
The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.
More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.”

— John Fowles

“He said, men are vile. I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.”

— John Fowles

“Moments like modulations come in human relationships: when what has been until then an objective situation, one perhaps described by the mind to itself in semi-literary terms, one it is sufficient merely to classify under some general heading (man with alcoholic problems, woman with unfortunate past, and so on) becomes subjective; becomes unique; becomes, by empathy, instantaneously shared rather than observed.”

— John Fowles

After you finish (writing a book) you are intensely depressed. It doesn't much matter whether the reviews are good or not. You feel empty, a field lying fallow, and you must let it stay fallow for a while. You love a book when it's being written. You are so close to it. You are the only person who knows it and it's still full of potential ... Then, suddenly, there's the dreadful day when you have the printed proof texts ... It's a feeling of death, really.

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles