John Fowles Quotes

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed."
"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."
"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”

— John Fowles

“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”

— John Fowles

“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”

— John Fowles

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

— John Fowles

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

— John Fowles

“Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.
They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.
His fairy story.”

— John Fowles

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

— John Fowles

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

— John Fowles

“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”

— John Fowles

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”

— John Fowles

“Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice.
On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.”

— John Fowles

“I want to tell you what's really happened."
"Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.”

— John Fowles

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

— John Fowles

“I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being.”

— John Fowles

“Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?”

— John Fowles

“You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.”

— John Fowles

“In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
- The French Lieutenant's Woman”

— John Fowles

“Knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning ... and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant "make love to me") it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her.”

— John Fowles

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.

— John Fowles

“I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.”

— John Fowles

“A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature.”

— John Fowles

“It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.”

— John Fowles

“The freedom that allows other freedons to exist”

— John Fowles

“He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.”

— John Fowles

“There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.”

— John Fowles

“You use your life.”

— John Fowles

I'm Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.

— John Fowles

“I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted.”

— John Fowles

“I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.”

— John Fowles

“People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.
The black and the black and the black.”

— John Fowles

“I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.”

— John Fowles

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

— John Fowles

“Humour is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is smile.”

— John Fowles

“Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.”

— John Fowles

The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not.

— John Fowles

“We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.”

— John Fowles

“Come clean Charles, come clean”

— John Fowles

“I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitations of the bourgeoisie.
( ... )
The New People are still the poor people, it is the new form of poverty. The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul.”

— John Fowles

“That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.”

— John Fowles

“Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan
that is the rule.”

— John Fowles

“Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.”

— John Fowles

“We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.”

— John Fowles

Death is the room that is always empty.

— John Fowles

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

— John Fowles

“The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.”

— John Fowles

“These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.”

— John Fowles

Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet.

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

— John Fowles

“If you want to be true to life, start lying about it”

— John Fowles