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John Fowles Quotes | Quotes said by John Fowles

  • John Fowles Quote #1

    ...there are times when silence is a poem.

  • John Fowles Quote #2

    A total stranger, and one not of one's sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.

  • John Fowles Quote #3

    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.

  • John Fowles Quote #4

    Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

  • John Fowles Quote #5

    An answer is always a form of death.

  • John Fowles Quote #6

    And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

  • John Fowles Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

    Armastan elada täisverelist elu, armastan kõiki, kes lihtsalt ei istu ja jälgi.

  • John Fowles Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    Because they died, we know we still live. 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.

  • John Fowles Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

  • John Fowles Quote #13

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

  • John Fowles Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

  • John Fowles Quote #16

    Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

  • John Fowles Quote #17

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

  • John Fowles Quote #18

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

  • John Fowles Quote #19

    Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon 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. You may die before you turn the next page.

  • John Fowles Quote #20

    He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

  • John Fowles Quote #21

    He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.

  • John Fowles Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    He stared to sea. I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.

  • John Fowles Quote #24

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

  • John Fowles Quote #25

    Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice.

    On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

  • John Fowles Quote #26

    I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being.

  • John Fowles Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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.

  • John Fowles Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

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