John Fowles Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

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

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

John Fowles
There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval.

John Fowles
The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal. He feels himself mysteriously inspired or possessed.

John Fowles
It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

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

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
There's a card in the Tarot pack called The Magus. The magician, conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose.

John Fowles
I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it... A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return...

John Fowles
I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.

John Fowles
She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn't the energy.

John Fowles
All good science is art. And all good art is science.

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

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
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
... even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals … A visual is more interested in style than in content … A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

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

John Fowles
Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?

John Fowles
I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

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
The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma - human or divine - can deminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.

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

John Fowles