John Fowles Quotes

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

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.

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.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

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

There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.

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

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

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

He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.

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

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

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.

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

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

The best wines take the longest to mature.

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.

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.""I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. "Thank you.""It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

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

...Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism, ...

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. 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.

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.

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.

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.

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

I needed a new mystery.

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

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.

I hate beyond hate.

...there are times when silence is a poem.

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

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.

Because they died, we know we still live. 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.

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

I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.’ ‘I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters.

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

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.