John Fowles - The Collector (1963)

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Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

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

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

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
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
It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.

John Fowles
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

John Fowles
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

John Fowles
He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

John Fowles
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

John Fowles
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.

John Fowles
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

John Fowles
Forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me.

John Fowles
The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

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

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

John Fowles
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.

John Fowles