John Fowles Quotes & Sayings

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. — John Fowles

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive. — John Fowles

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern. — John Fowles

The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised. — John Fowles

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself. — John Fowles

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them. — John Fowles

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different. — John Fowles

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

I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted. — John Fowles

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. — John Fowles

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden. — 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

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation. — 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

All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart, too. — 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

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most. — 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

The best wines take the longest to mature. — 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

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

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."
She shifted her head, not understanding.
I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur. — John Fowles

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

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more. — John Fowles

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her. — John Fowles

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry. — John Fowles

How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old? — John Fowles

Moments one knows only death will obliterate. — John Fowles

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about. — 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

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

Victims?"
"Whatever you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice."
"That sounds like an excellent definition of man. — John Fowles

It was curious how quiet that last evening was; as if I had already left, and we were just two ghosts talking to each other. — John Fowles

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived. — 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

Restless and walked down to the harbour. It was about eleven at night — John Fowles

We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end. — John Fowles

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

I mean most women just want to be good at something, they've got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can't ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn't seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds. — 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 hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitations of the bourgeoisie.
( ... )
The New People are still the poor people, it is the new form of poverty. The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul. — John Fowles

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. — 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 left a pause. 'You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.' 'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view. — 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

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death. — John Fowles

I had just written a letter to Alison, but already she seemed far away, not in distance, not in time, but in some dimension for which there is no name. Reality, perhaps. — John Fowles

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

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever. — John Fowles

There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum. — John Fowles

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart. — 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 am Mrs. Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master."
"His Infinitude has been informed of your decease, ma'am. His angels have already sung a Jubilate in celebration of the event."
"That is most proper and kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler's head. But the man did not move aside. Instead, he rather impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand.
"My man! Make way. I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis."
"Formerly of Lyme Regis, ma'am. And now of a much more tropical abode."
With that, the brutal flunkey slammed the door in her face. — 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

Because they died, we know we still live. 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

Moments like modulations come in human relationships: when what has been until then an objective situation, one perhaps described by the mind to itself in semi-literary terms, one it is sufficient merely to classify under some general heading (man with alcoholic problems, woman with unfortunate past, and so on) becomes subjective; becomes unique; becomes, by empathy, instantaneously shared rather than observed. — John Fowles

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. 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. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now. — John Fowles

8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life. — 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

She had only a candle's light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman. — John Fowles

The profoundest distances are never geographical. — 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

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan
that is the rule. — John Fowles

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.
All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone
had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her. — John Fowles

He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him. — John Fowles

A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature. — John Fowles

The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library. — 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

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap. — John Fowles

It's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind. — 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

She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real. — 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

The stairs were certainly steep; and in those days, when they could rarely see their own feet, women were always falling; it was a commonplace of domestic life. — John Fowles

Always we try to put the wild in a cage. — John Fowles

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

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. — John Fowles

He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I'm not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever. — John Fowles

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good. — 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

You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth. — 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

They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough - two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth. — John Fowles

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

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. — John Fowles

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man. — 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

Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity. — John Fowles

Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals.
Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce
determined to survive, whatever the cost. — John Fowles

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

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me. — John Fowles

The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence ... I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality ... But I've always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones. I don't see how the "lies" we write and the "lies" we live can or should be divided. They are seamless, one canvas, for me. While we live we can keep them apart, but not command the future to do the same. The outrage some Thomas Hardy fans have shown over all the revelations about the private man seems to me hypocritical in the extreme. They hugely enrich our understanding of him ... I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them - and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.
(Letter to Jo Jones, September 15, 1980, arguing for the preservation of John Collier's personal papers) — 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

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

Come clean Charles, come clean — John Fowles

Let those love now who've never loved; let those who've loved, love yet again. — John Fowles

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper. — John Fowles

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love. — John Fowles

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow. — John Fowles