Fowles Quotes & Sayings

A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion. — John Fowles

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. — John Fowles

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

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

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children. — Emma Donoghue

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

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

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money. — 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

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation. — 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

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

The freedom that allows other freedons to exist — John Fowles

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

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

She died."
I had to prompt him.
"Soon after?"
"In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital."
"Poor girl."
"All past. All under the sea."
"You make it seem present."
"I do not wish to make you sad."
"The scent of lilac."
"Old man's sentiment. Forgive me."
There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.
"Is this why you never married?"
"The dead live."
The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.
"How do they live?"
And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.
"By love. — John Fowles

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence. — John Fowles

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

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

Death is the room that is always empty. — John Fowles

I have not made up my mind about Marian (another M! I heard the supervisor call her name), this time it won't be love, it would just be for the interest of the thing ... and the clothes would fit. Of course I would make it clear from the start who's boss and what I expect ... but it is still just an idea. — John Fowles

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care. — John Fowles

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult. — John Fowles

Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not. — 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

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

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger. — 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

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. — 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

Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all. — 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

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist. — John Fowles

I needed a new mystery. — 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

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

We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy. — 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

As if I'd lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I'd done was to see his real face by it. — John Fowles

what this instruction cannot give is the deepest benefit of any art, be it of making, or of knowing, or of experiencing: which is self-expression and self-discovery. — 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

I know what it's like when people go away. It's agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it's life, that's the way the things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven't really lost something for ever. — John Fowles

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. — John Fowles

The profoundest distances are never geographical. — John Fowles

These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision. — John Fowles

The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love. — John Fowles

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. — John Fowles

Because I don't understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives. — 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

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction. — John Fowles

And like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring — John Fowles

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. — 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

Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph. — John Fowles

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real. — John Fowles

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel. — 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'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

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

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

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore. — John Fowles

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens. — John Fowles

He said it as if 'very rich' was a nationality; as perhaps it is. — 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

I am infinitely strange to myself. — John Fowles

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens. — John Fowles

Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet. — John Fowles

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

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification. — 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

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

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was. — 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

Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea. — John Fowles

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

In my opinion a lot of people who may seem happy now would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time. I — 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

He got up and said, I think you've got something in you. I don't know. Women very rarely have. 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 — 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 privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance. — 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

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did. — 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

He is the same, but everything is different. — 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

...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant's Woman — 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

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

Humour is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is smile. — 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

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

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

Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time. — John Fowles

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

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want. — John Fowles