John Fowles Quotes

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

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. ~ 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 - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. ~ John Fowles

The world began in hazard and will end in it. ~ 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

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

I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased. ~ John Fowles

M. I've never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She's always been my mother I've hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I've met or heard of, she's the lamest. I've never given her enough sympathy. I haven't given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I've given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven't felt so sorry for her for years. I've always excused myself - I've said, I'm kind and tolerant with everyone else, she's the one person I can't be like that with, and there has to be an exception to the general rule. So it doesn't matter. But of course that's wrong. She's the last person that should be an exception to the general rule.

Minny and I have so often despised D for putting up with her. We ought to go down on
our knees to him. ~ John Fowles

Moments one knows only death will obliterate. ~ John Fowles

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us. ~ John Fowles

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

The thin end of the sensible clothes wedge had been inserted in society by the disgraceful Mrs Bloomer a decade and a half before the year of which I write; but that early attempt at the trouser suit had been comprehensively defeated by the crinoline--a small fact of considerable significance in our understanding of the Victorians. They were offered sense; and chose a six-foot folly unparalleled in the most folly-ridden of minor arts. ~ John Fowles

Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey. ~ John Fowles

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass. ~ 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

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
- The French Lieutenant's Woman ~ John Fowles

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

Successful artistic parents seem very rarely to give birth to equally successful artistic sons and daughters, and I suspect it may be because the urge to create, which must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality, is better fostered
despite modern educational theory
not by a sympathetic and 'creative' childhood environment, but the very opposite, by pruning and confining natural instinct. ~ John Fowles

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

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again. ~ John Fowles

Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.
John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop. ~ John Fowles

It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle classes such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself. ~ John Fowles

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

German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate. ~ John Fowles

I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be. ~ 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

Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse. It is quintessentially 'wild' ... unphilosophical, irrational uncontrollable, incalculable. ~ John Fowles

Visitors to Lyme in the nineteenth century, if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal facing travellers to the ancient Greek colonies -Charles did not actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world news summary from the steps of the Town Hall- were certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to. ~ John Fowles

The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves. ~ John Fowles

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night? ~ John Fowles

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope. ~ John Fowles

The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not. ~ John Fowles

I know I can't do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who'll betray me. I feel it. ~ John Fowles

Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. ~ John Fowles

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration. ~ John Fowles

Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped. ~ John Fowles

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands. ~ John Fowles

Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal. ~ John Fowles

I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality. ~ John Fowles

The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken. ~ John Fowles

what you do blurs over what you did before. ~ John Fowles

She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery ... she said, Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you. ~ 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

He said, men are vile. I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces. ~ 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

Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves' quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path. ~ John Fowles

It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield
that is something different.
Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death. And just as much in my own comrades, in Montague, as in the invisible Germans. ~ John Fowles

Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread. ~ John Fowles

It's like being halfway through the book. I can't just throw it in the dustbin. ~ John Fowles

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

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal. ~ John Fowles

The best wines take the longest to mature. ~ John Fowles

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

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. ~ John Fowles

Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result. ~ John Fowles

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror ~ John Fowles

And the sky all wild, all free, all wind and air and space and stars. ~ John Fowles

When you love me, it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am. ~ 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

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

Why should people have money if they don't know how to use it? ~ John Fowles

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one. ~ 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. ~ John Fowles

Come clean Charles, come clean ~ John Fowles

If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless. ~ John Fowles

Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way - they don't mind that. It even excites them. But what they can't stand is that I hate them when they don't behave in their own way. ~ John Fowles

A word ( ... ) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever ( ... ) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer. ~ John Fowles

I felt like a germ that had landed, like the first penicillin microbe, not only in a culture where it was totally at home, totally nourished; but in a situation in which it was infinitely significant. ~ John Fowles

I am infinitely strange to myself. ~ John Fowles

Ask me to marry you."

"Will you marry me?"

"No. ~ John Fowles

You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else. ~ John Fowles

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing. ~ John Fowles

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity. ~ John Fowles

...only extroverts cry twice.. ~ John Fowles

Life is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea. ~ John Fowles

It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England. ~ John Fowles

I've been sitting here and thinking about God. I don't think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn't intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can't hear. There's nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can't care about the individuals. He's planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn't know, and he doesn't care. So he doesn't exist, really. ~ John Fowles

If Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her. ~ John Fowles

I remember later he said (Professor Higgins again), you don't really stand a dog's chance anyhow. You're too pretty. The art of love's your line: not the love of art. ~ John Fowles

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

The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices. ~ John Fowles

Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write. ~ John Fowles

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.'
'Prose and pudding?'
'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls. ~ John Fowles

There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world. ~ John Fowles

If you feel something deeply, you're not ashamed to show your feeling. ~ John Fowles

How I hate ignorance! Caliban's ignorance, my ignorance, the world's ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much. ~ John Fowles

She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them. ~ John Fowles

You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it. ~ John Fowles

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self. ~ John Fowles

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

...she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter's night. She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked - a dancer, an actress. ~ John Fowles

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. ~ John Fowles

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation. ~ 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

I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always does 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. Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them. ~ John Fowles

His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad. ~ John Fowles

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face. ~ John Fowles

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive. ~ John Fowles