John Fowles Quotes

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

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

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.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

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.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

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

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.

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.' He turned. 'You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy.'

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

The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.

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.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

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.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

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

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.

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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.

Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.

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

My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.

Science disembodies; art embodies.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

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

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

Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.

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.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel." "I can feel." "No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine." "It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

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

I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

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.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects? It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women?and absurd.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

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.

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 for ever, and therefore am sad."

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.

To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

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