Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”

— John Fowles

152. “The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.”

— John Fowles

153. “The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed – thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes – because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself – and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”

— John Fowles

154. “Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.”

— John Fowles

155. “He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

157. “I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.”

— John Fowles

158. “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

159. “His name was Captain Montague. He had broken his leg some time before and so had been unfit for active service till then. A kind of phosphorescent pale elegance about his face. A delicate, gallant moustache. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”

— John Fowles

160. “All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.”

— John Fowles

161. “Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.”

— John Fowles

162. “The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.”

— John Fowles

163. “There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.”

— John Fowles

164. “They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough – two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.”

— John Fowles

165. “A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.”

— John Fowles

166. “Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.”

— John Fowles

167. “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

168. “Death is the room that is always empty.”

— John Fowles

169. “Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.”

— John Fowles

170. “I’m Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and 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

171. “Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.”

— John Fowles

172. “Lizards flashed up the pine-trunks like living emerald necklaces.”

— John Fowles

173. “All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.”

— John Fowles

174. “An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.”

— John Fowles

175. “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

176. “As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.”

— John Fowles

177. “Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”

— John Fowles

178. “Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.”

— John Fowles

179. “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

180. “My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.”

— John Fowles

181. “We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.”

— John Fowles

182. “The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.”

— John Fowles

183. “I don’t think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.”

— John Fowles

184. “The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.”

— John Fowles

185. “Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

— John Fowles

186. “I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.”

— John Fowles

187. “Never take another human being literally. He added. Even when they are so ignorant that they don’t know what ‘literally’ means.”

— John Fowles

188. “A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary’s; it reversed the entire order of nature.”

— John Fowles

189. “You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf – your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.”

— John Fowles

190. “Because I don’t understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.”

— John Fowles

191. “No religion is the only religion, no church the true church.”

— John Fowles

192. “Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism.”

— John Fowles

193. “The thin end of the sensible clothes wedge had been inserted in society by the disgraceful Mrs Bloomer a decade and a half before the year of which I write; but that early attempt at the trouser suit had been comprehensively defeated by the crinoline – a small fact of considerable significance in our understanding of the Victorians. They were offered sense; and chose a six-foot folly unparalleled in the most folly-ridden of minor arts.”

— John Fowles

194. “Successful artistic parents seem very rarely to give birth to equally successful artistic sons and daughters, and I suspect it may be because the urge to create, which must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality, is better fostered – despite modern educational theory – not by a sympathetic and ‘creative’ childhood environment, but the very opposite, by pruning and confining natural instinct.”

— John Fowles

195. “Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.”

— John Fowles

196. “Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.”

— John Fowles

197. “You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.”

— John Fowles

198. “As if I’d lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I’d done was to see his real face by it.”

— John Fowles

199. “But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.”

— John Fowles

200. “That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.”

— John Fowles