Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If there is a God he’s a great loathsome spider in the darkness.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

103. “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

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

— John Fowles

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

118. “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

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

— John Fowles

120. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

123. “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

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

— John Fowles

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— John Fowles

129. “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

130. “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

131. “I hate beyond hate.”

— John Fowles

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

138. “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

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

— John Fowles

140. “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

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

— John Fowles

142. “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

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

— John Fowles

144. “Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.”

— John Fowles

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

150. “He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”

— John Fowles