John Fowles Quotations

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

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

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

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

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

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

So I felt this burning summer. In form I might belong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of a ravenous self-destroying horde of rats. I am glad there is no God. If there were, I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic, and insatiably self-centred creatures should be allowed to survive a single day more

So I felt this burning summer. In form I mightbelong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of aravenous self-destroying horde of rats.I am glad there is no God. If there were,I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic, andinsatiably self-centred creatures shouldbe allowed to survive a single day more

You are like a porcupine. When the animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.

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

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.

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

I can see it is very far from being universally well written. I fell into almost every trap awaiting the tyro writer.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

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.

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.

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.

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

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.

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

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.

Science disembodies; art embodies.

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.

People knew less of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

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.

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

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.

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

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. 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.

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.

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.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

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

Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

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

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

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.

The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

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

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.

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

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

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

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

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.

There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

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

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

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.

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

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.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

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

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.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

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

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects? It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women?and absurd.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.