Top 100 Fowles Quotes
#1. 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
#2. He crossed his arms over the chair back and smirked his disapproval at Brother Fowles. "Sir, I offer you my condolences. Personally I've never been troubled by any such difficulties with interpreting God's word." "Indeed, I see that," Brother Fowles said.
Barbara Kingsolver
#3. 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
#4. The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.
John Fowles
#5. 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
#6. No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.
John Fowles
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
#11. 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.
John Fowles
#12. When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
#13. I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman's house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.
John Fowles
#14. There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
#16. Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet.
John Fowles
#17. 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
#18. The freedom that allows other freedons to exist
John Fowles
#19. Humour is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is smile.
John Fowles
#20. Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.
John Fowles
#21. 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
#22. To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
#23. He said, men are vile. I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.
John Fowles
#24. Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'
'For fun?'
'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
John Fowles
#25. 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.
John Fowles
#26. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.
John Fowles
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.
John Fowles
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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.
John Fowles
#36. The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives.
John Fowles
#37. When you love me, it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.
John Fowles
#38. Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
#39. 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
#40. I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.
John Fowles
#41. Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
John Fowles
#42. Ask me to marry you."
"Will you marry me?"
"No.
John Fowles
#43. I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.
John Fowles
#44. One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
#45. I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.
John Fowles
#46. There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.
John Fowles
#47. The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.
John Fowles
#48. She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment.
John Fowles
#49. For you I'll always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and she'll always come back for another weekend of cheap knock.
John Fowles
#50. I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.
John Fowles
#51. 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
#52. Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
#53. 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
#54. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.
John Fowles
#55. 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
#56. And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.
John Fowles
#57. That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
#58. Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
John Fowles
#59. The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
John Fowles
#60. You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles
#61. He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
John Fowles
#62. I am talking about the general psychological health
of the species, man. He needs the existence of
mysteries. Not their solution.
John Fowles
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.
As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.
John Fowles
#68. And the sky all wild, all free, all wind and air and space and stars.
John Fowles
#70. Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.
John Fowles
#71. Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
#72. The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.
John Fowles
#73. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
#74. Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
John Fowles
#75. 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
#76. The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
#77. 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.
John Fowles
#78. 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
#79. I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen."
"I think you may be."
I smiled dubiously. "Thank you."
"It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.
John Fowles
#80. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
#81. Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.
John Fowles
#82. The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
#83. The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.
John Fowles
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.
John Fowles
#87. All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
#88. Oh,clever ... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?
John Fowles
#89. 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
#90. 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.
John Fowles
#91. Sex is just an activity, like anything else. It's not dirty, it's just two people playing with each other's bodies. Like dancing. Like a game.
John Fowles
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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.
John Fowles
#95. The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
#96. 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.
John Fowles
#97. There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
#98. Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal.
John Fowles
#99. 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
#100. The feeling that he would probably betray me. And I've always thought of marriage as a sort of young adventure, two people of the same age setting out together, discovering together, growing together. But I would have nothing to tell him, nothing to show him. All the helping would be on his side.
John Fowles
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