John Fowles Quotes

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

— John Fowles

“It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”

— John Fowles

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”

— John Fowles

“I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.”

— John Fowles

I know what it's like when people go away. It's agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it's life, that's the way the things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven't really lost something for ever.

— John Fowles

“We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.”

— John Fowles

“Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.”

— John Fowles

“But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.”

— John Fowles

“Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'
'For fun?'
'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.”

— John Fowles

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

— John Fowles

“No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.”

— John Fowles

“You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.”

— John Fowles

“She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment.”

— John Fowles

“Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way-they don't mind that. It even excites them. But what they can't stand is that I hate them when they don't behave in their own way.”

— John Fowles

“She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.
'You're being very silent.'
'That's how men cry.”

— John Fowles

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

— John Fowles

“And like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring”

— John Fowles

An answer is always a form of death.

— John Fowles

As if I'd lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I'd done was to see his real face by it.

— John Fowles

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.

— John Fowles

“It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield
that is something different.
Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death. And just as much in my own comrades, in Montague, as in the invisible Germans.”

— John Fowles

“If Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.”

— John Fowles

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

— John Fowles

If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.

— John Fowles

“You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else.”

— John Fowles

“If you feel something deeply, you're not ashamed to show your feeling.”

— John Fowles

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more.

— John Fowles

“Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.”

— John Fowles

“The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.”

— John Fowles

I mean most women just want to be good at something, they've got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can't ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn't seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds.

— John Fowles

“A cloud, it would”

— John Fowles

“Restless and walked down to the harbour. It was about eleven at night”

— John Fowles

“Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves' quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.”

— John Fowles

“They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough-two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.”

— John Fowles

But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.

— John Fowles

“Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.”

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

“An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles