John Fowles Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

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

John Fowles
There are only two races on this planet—the intelligent and the stupid.

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

John Fowles
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians...

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

John Fowles
[The staff common room] was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility... a sere notifier of what is.

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
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.

John Fowles
A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the 'Aegean blues'. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.

John Fowles
One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum.

John Fowles
The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.

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

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

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

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

John Fowles
I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.

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
An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg — and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

John Fowles
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
It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

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

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

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
"You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient."
"I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."

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

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles