John Fowles Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

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

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

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

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

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.

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

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.

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

And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

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.

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

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

Death is the room that is always empty.

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.

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

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

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

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

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.

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.

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

How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

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

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

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.

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

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

Between skin and skin, there is only light.

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

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.

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

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

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

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

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

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

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

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

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

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.