John Fowles Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

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

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

John Fowles
The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.

John Fowles
There seemed many great auks till the last one was killed.

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

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

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

John Fowles
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
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.

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

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

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

John Fowles
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

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

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

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

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

John Fowles
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

John Fowles
Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view...

John Fowles
He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…

John Fowles
I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

John Fowles