John Fowles Quotes (71 Quotes)


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

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

    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.

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



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

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

    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.

    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.

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

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

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

    Night fell again. There was war to the south, but our sector was quiet. 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.

    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

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

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

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

    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.

    Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.


    Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.


    Related Authors


    Charles Dickens - Umberto Eco - Salman Rushdie - Robert Ludlum - Nathaniel Hawthorne - Fyodor Dostoevsky - Emily Bronte - Anne Rice - Alistair Maclean - Aldous Huxley


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