John Fowles famous quotes

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

#Life #Philosophy #Important

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

#Writing #Novelists #Needs

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.
-- John Fowles

#Acceptance #Accepting Yourself #There Comes A Time

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

#Real #Two #Novelists

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.
-- John Fowles

#Couple #Successful #Opposites

People knew less of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or 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. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.
-- John Fowles

#Beautiful #Thinking #Space

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

#Suicide #Writing #Contradictory

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." "You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
-- John Fowles

#Men #Race #Self

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

#Thinking #Mercy #Insects

I am infinitely strange to myself.
-- John Fowles

#Strange

The profoundest distances are never geographical.
-- John Fowles

#Distance

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

#Mean #Wish #One Day

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

#Forget

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.
-- John Fowles

#Hate #Mean #Jealous

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.
-- John Fowles

#Life #Heart #Copying

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
-- John Fowles

#Sight #Desolation

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.
-- John Fowles

#Nature #Moving #Tree

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

#Stupid #Silly #Intelligent

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

#Character #Events

Science disembodies; art embodies.
-- John Fowles

#Art

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

#Fighting #Selfishness #Brutality

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg — and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.
-- John Fowles

#Strong #Morning #Wind

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

#Stupid #Men #Ironic

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

#Wind #Cobwebs #Hours

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
-- John Fowles

#Men #Ideas #Wife

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

#Voice #Choices #Speak

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

#People #Cherish #Illusion

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.
-- John Fowles

#Beautiful #Hate #Trying

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

#Men #Mask #Pronouns

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

#God #Definitions

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

#Art #Murder #Window