Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.”

— John Fowles

102. “If there is a God he’s a great loathsome spider in the darkness.”

— John Fowles

103. “If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.”

— John Fowles

104. “In my opinion a lot of people who may seem happy now would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time. I.”

— John Fowles

105. “The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe – so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.”

— John Fowles

106. “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

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

— John Fowles

108. “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

109. “One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness.”

— John Fowles

110. “It was not the mask I was afraid of... but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.”

— John Fowles

111. “The honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.”

— John Fowles

112. “I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.”

— John Fowles

113. “To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.”

— John Fowles

114. “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

115. “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

116. “The truth was I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.”

— John Fowles

117. “Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.”

— John Fowles

118. “There are only two races on this planet – the intelligent and the stupid.”

— John Fowles

119. “Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.”

— John Fowles

120. “There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common – a need to create an alternative world.”

— John Fowles

121. “You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”

— John Fowles

122. “One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.”

— John Fowles

123. “Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care.”

— John Fowles

124. “She had only a candle’s light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman.”

— John Fowles

125. “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.”

— John Fowles

126. “The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?”

— John Fowles

127. “The great majority of modern third-person narration is “I” narration very thinly disguised.”

— John Fowles

128. “Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way – they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.”

— John Fowles

129. “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.”

— John Fowles

130. “I hate beyond hate.”

— John Fowles

131. “We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.”

— John Fowles

132. “The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.”

— John Fowles

133. “You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don’t you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story 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

134. “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.”

— John Fowles

135. “I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.”

— John Fowles

136. “Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.”

— John Fowles

137. “The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives.”

— John Fowles

138. “Visitors to Lyme in the nineteenth century, if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal facing travellers to the ancient Greek colonies -Charles did not actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world news summary from the steps of the Town Hall- were certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to.”

— John Fowles

139. “The truth was she couldn’t do ugly things. She was too beautiful.”

— John Fowles

140. “The feeling that he would probably betray me. And I’ve always thought of marriage as a sort of young adventure, two people of the same age setting out together, discovering together, growing together. But I would have nothing to tell him, nothing to show him. All the helping would be on his side.”

— John Fowles

141. “We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.”

— John Fowles

142. “There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.”

— John Fowles

143. “Some people would say- you’re only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn’t matter. But all the evil in the world’s made up of little drops. It’s silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.”

— John Fowles

144. “You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.”

— John Fowles

145. “We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.”

— John Fowles

146. “If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.”

— John Fowles

147. “Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to ‘lesser’ life on this planet.”

— John Fowles

148. “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.”

— John Fowles

149. “How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?”

— John Fowles

150. “She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.”

— John Fowles