John Fowles Quotes

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• The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

  John Fowles

  Life, Philosophy, Important

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

  John Fowles

  Want, Accepting, Decent

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

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• The profoundest distances are never geographical.

  John Fowles

  Distance

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• 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

  Love, Time, Couple

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

  John Fowles

  Stupid, Silly, Intelligent

  "Daily Telegraph", August 15, 1991.

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• Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

  John Fowles

  Love, War, Men

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

  John Fowles

  Alive, Way

  John Fowles (2010). “The Collector”, p.118, Random House

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• Time is not a road - it is a room.

  John Fowles

  Time, Rooms

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• The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.

  John Fowles

  Love, Sex, Men

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• There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

  John Fowles

  Life, Philosophy, Acceptance

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• 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

  Nature, Attitude, Lying

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• 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

  Thinking, Imagination, Empathy

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

  John Fowles

  Writing, Novelists, Needs

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• 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

  Nature, Moving, Tree

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• The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.' 'I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.' He turned. 'You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy.'

  John Fowles

  Men, Race, Self

  "The Magus".

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• I am infinitely strange to myself.

  John Fowles

  Strange

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

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• People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.

  John Fowles

  Beautiful, Thinking, Space

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• I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

  John Fowles

  Kings, Reality, Long

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

  John Fowles

  Thinking, Mercy, Insects

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

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• Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.

  John Fowles

  Angel, Clouds, Glasses

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• 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

  Book, Hatred, Desire

  John Fowles (2005). “The Journals: 1949-1965”, Knopf

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• Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

  John Fowles

  Sight, Desolation, Whole

  John Fowles (1977). “Daniel Martin”, Jonathan Cape

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

  John Fowles

  Real, Two, Novelists

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

  John Fowles

  Character, Events

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

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

  John Fowles

  Suicide, Writing, Contradictory

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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