Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

3. “Wolves don’t hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

5. “We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”

— John Fowles

6. “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

7. “The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

9. “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

10. “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

11. “The profoundest distances are never geographical.”

— John Fowles

12. “Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”

— John Fowles

13. “The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.”

— John Fowles

14. “Always we try to put the wild in a cage.”

— John Fowles

15. “Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?”

— John Fowles

16. “In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.”

— John Fowles

17. “Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.”

— John Fowles

18. “Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan – that is the rule.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

20. “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

21. “These last few days I’ve felt Godless. I’ve felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

23. “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

24. “Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

26. “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.”

— John Fowles

27. “When you love me, it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.”

— John Fowles

28. “The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.”

— John Fowles

29. “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.”

— John Fowles

30. “I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.”

— John Fowles

31. “If you want to be true to life, start lying about it.”

— John Fowles

32. “I am infinitely strange to myself.”

— John Fowles

33. “Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”

— John Fowles

34. “I have hope. But it’s all an illusion.”

— John Fowles

35. “I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.”

— John Fowles

36. “The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.”

— John Fowles

37. “Man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got.”

— John Fowles

38. “If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.”

— John Fowles

39. “Man is about to be deprived of a great pole – work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.”

— John Fowles

40. “There was no art in cultures as ancient as the Egyptian and the Minoan. Conscious art did not exist for them. They wanted only to control. That is how they would want us to judge them – by how well they controlled.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

42. “Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? What are you drinking? The water or the wave?”

— John Fowles

43. “There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

— John Fowles

44. “When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.”

— John Fowles

45. “The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.”

— John Fowles

46. “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.”

— John Fowles

47. “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

48. “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.”

— John Fowles

49. “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

50. “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.”

— John Fowles