Best 234 quotes of John Fowles on MyQuotes

John Fowles

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

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    John Fowles

    Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

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    John Fowles

    But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    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?

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    John Fowles

    Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

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    John Fowles

    Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

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    John Fowles

    Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.

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    John Fowles

    He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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    John Fowles

    He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

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    John Fowles

    He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

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    John Fowles

    He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?

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    John Fowles

    I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

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

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    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.

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    John Fowles

    I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.