John Fowles Quotes (71 Quotes)

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.

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

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

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

But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

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

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.

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.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

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.

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.

Between skin and skin, there is only light.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.

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

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

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.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

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.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

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

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 diewith the rest of your body.

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

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.

Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

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

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

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

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