John Fowles Quotes

John Fowles Quotes

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

A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

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.

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

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

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.

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

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.

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

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.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

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.

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.

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

– Ух какой громадный, – пробормотала она.

I want to tell you what's really happened."

"Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."

And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

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.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed-thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes-because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself-and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

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?

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

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals.
Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce - determined to survive, whatever the cost.

Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.

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

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

Sıradan insan uygarlığın lanetidir.

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

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.

She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.
'You're being very silent.'
'That's how men cry.

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.

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