Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “No religion is the only religion, no church the true church.”

— John Fowles

202. “Science disembodies; art embodies.”

— John Fowles

203. “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

204. “And I just can’t live in this present. I would go mad if I did.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— John Fowles

210. “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

211. “You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else.”

— John Fowles

212. “They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.”

— John Fowles

213. “Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking... It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”

— John Fowles

214. “Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.”

— John Fowles

215. “The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won.”

— John Fowles

216. “But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you.”

— John Fowles

217. “One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true.”

— John Fowles

218. “Laziness, I am afraid, was Charles’s distinguishing trait.”

— John Fowles

219. “I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.”

— John Fowles

220. “But suddenly he comprehended why her face haunted him, why he felt this terrible need to see her again: it was to possess her, to melt into her, to burn, to burn, to burn to ashes on that body and in those eyes. To postpone such a desire for a week, a month, a year, several years even, that can be done. But for eternity is when the iron bites.”

— John Fowles

221. “German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate.”

— John Fowles

222. “Edith Sitwell’s interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.”

— John Fowles

223. “I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one’s faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple.”

— John Fowles

224. “One writes things and the implications shriek- it’s like suddenly realizing one’s deaf.”

— John Fowles

225. “You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight – and smile at your own past sorrows.”

— John Fowles

226. “He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.”

— John Fowles

227. “It’s despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It’s despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world. It’s despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they’ve won a lot of money. And then do what you’ve done to me.”

— John Fowles

228. “But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.”

— John Fowles

229. “Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.”

— John Fowles

230. “I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.”

— John Fowles

231. “He has that selfishness – it’s not even an honest selfishness, because he puts the blame on life and then enjoys being selfish with a free conscience.”

— John Fowles

232. “Oh, you’re like mercury. You won’t be picked up.”

— John Fowles

233. “So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.”

— John Fowles

234. “He stood before the famous Rembrandt self portrait. The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality.”

— John Fowles

235. “One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true – they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, “You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love.” They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

— John Fowles

236. “It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period’s standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.”

— John Fowles

237. “The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life-success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such.”

— John Fowles

238. “Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at the moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.”

— John Fowles

239. “The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.”

— John Fowles

240. “Under the silver nailparing of a moon. I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.”

— John Fowles

241. “Beware of the waiting room.” He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly, and leaned out to call after him, “The what?” He turned, but only to give a sharp wave, the Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind, it secreted an omission. Something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room. Waiting room. Waiting room. It went round in my head all that evening.”

— John Fowles

242. “Another thing I said to Caliban the other day-we were listening to Jazz- I said, don’t you just dig this? And he says, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said. Like rain, endless dreary rain. Color-killing.”

— John Fowles

243. “We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning – and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal – to realise ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, “I possess this now, therefore I am happy,” instead of what it so Victorianly was: “I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.”

— John Fowles

244. “But the one perfume you really want is freedom.”

— John Fowles

245. “Nothing is real. All is fiction. Somewhere there’s someone writing us, we’re not real. He or she decides who we are, what we do, all about us.”

— John Fowles

246. “We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.”

— John Fowles

247. “It was no good my knowing that old men have conned young ones like that ever since time began. I still fell for it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the right hands and contexts.”

— John Fowles

248. “There were even times I thought I would forget her. But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.”

— John Fowles

249. “He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.”

— John Fowles

250. “It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality – one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time.”

— John Fowles