Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.”

— John Fowles

55. “Between skin and skin, there is only light.”

— John Fowles

56. “Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.? To live alone?? To live. With what you are.”

— John Fowles

57. “It’s like living in the Arabian Nights. Being the favourite in the harem. But the one perfume you really want is freedom.”

— John Fowles

58. “He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.”

— John Fowles

59. “He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.”

— John Fowles

60. “The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.”

— John Fowles

61. “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.”

— John Fowles

62. “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.”

— John Fowles

63. “It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”

— John Fowles

64. “Time is not a road – it is a room.”

— John Fowles

65. “If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”

— John Fowles

66. “They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.”

— John Fowles

67. “No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.”

— John Fowles

Featured in: Reading Quotes

68. “That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.”

— John Fowles

Featured in: Romance Quotes

69. “Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.”

— John Fowles

70. “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.”

— John Fowles

71. “Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.”

— John Fowles

72. “It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

74. “People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.”

— John Fowles

75. “I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn’t mind at all. It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.”

— John Fowles

76. “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.”

— John Fowles

77. “It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.”

— John Fowles

78. “That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.”

— John Fowles

79. “Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.”

— John Fowles

80. “The best wines take the longest to mature.”

— John Fowles

81. “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

82. “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.”

— John Fowles

83. “The world began in hazard and will end in it.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

85. “Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.”

— John Fowles

86. “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.”

— John Fowles

87. “Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.”

— John Fowles

88. “I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds.”

— John Fowles

89. “It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”

— John Fowles

90. “Love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.”

— John Fowles

91. “Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical, and I was never accomplished at that. ‘I.”

— John Fowles

92. “Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no given ‘right’ reaction.”

— John Fowles

93. “Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

95. “You don’t have any time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don’t go to silly films, even if you want to; you don’t read cheap newspapers; you don’t listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don’t waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”

— John Fowles

96. “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.”

— John Fowles

97. “It’s like football. Two sides may each want to beat the other, they may even hate each other as sides, but if someone came and told them football is stupid and not worth playing or caring about, then they’d feel together. It’s feeling that matters.”

— John Fowles

98. “The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.”

— John Fowles

99. “The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.”

— John Fowles

100. “Perhaps nowhere is our human mania for possessing, our delusion that the owned cannot have a soul of its own, more harmful to us. This disanimation justified all the horrors of the African slave trade. If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal.”

— John Fowles