John Fowles - The Magus (1965)

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

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

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

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

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
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.

John Fowles
The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed." "I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self." "You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

John Fowles
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

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

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

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

John Fowles
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

John Fowles
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

John Fowles
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

John Fowles
It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.

John Fowles
That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.

John Fowles
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

John Fowles
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

John Fowles
If there was some central theme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it is perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific, that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs and the Israelis, or the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas.

John Fowles
The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.

John Fowles
Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

John Fowles
I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life.

John Fowles
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

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

John Fowles