John Fowles Quotes

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

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

An answer is always a form of death.

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

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.

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

I am infinitely strange to myself.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

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.

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

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.

Science disembodies; art embodies.

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

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.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

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

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

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

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

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

It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

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

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

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

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.

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.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

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.

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 for ever, and therefore am sad."

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.

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

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

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

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

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

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

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

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.

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