Top 163 Quotes & Sayings by John Fowles

An answer is always a form of death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

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.

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

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.

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.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

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.

Death is the room that is always empty.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

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.

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.

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.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

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

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.

That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

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.

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.

And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

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.'

There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

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

Science disembodies; art embodies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

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

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.

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

Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.

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.

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 profoundest distances are never geographical.

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

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