John Fowles Quotes - Page 6

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• The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.

  John Fowles

  Time, Perfect, Humanity

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

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• He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

  John Fowles

  Stupid, Men, Ironic

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

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• 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

  Believe, Talking, Acting

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

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• 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

  Stars, Men, Thinking

  John Fowles (2010). “Wormholes”, p.328, Random House

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• Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

  John Fowles

  Life, Men, Contentment

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• Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

  John Fowles

  Cancer, Love You, Fairy Stories

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

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

  John Fowles

  Evil, Pot, Duty

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

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• She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

  John Fowles

  Passion, Men, Soul

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

  John Fowles

  Sympathy, Reality, Historical

  John Fowles (1970). “The Aristos”, Signet Book

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• I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

  John Fowles

  Thinking, America, Like Me

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• Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.

  John Fowles

  Beautiful, Football, Baseball

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• 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

  Thinking, Feelings, Wonderful

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

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• I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

  John Fowles

  Girl, Sex, Loneliness

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

  5 Copy quote

• Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on 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.

  John Fowles

  Hazards, Looks, May

  "The Aristos".

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• 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

  Effort, Green, Cynicism

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

  7 Copy quote

• Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

  John Fowles

  Music, Art, Creative

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• Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

  John Fowles

  Mirrors, Suffering, Greece

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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

  John Fowles

  Night, Risk, Lasts

  1965 The Magus, ch.19.

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• 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

  Comforting, Abhorrent, News

  1974 The Ebony Tower,'Poor Koko'.

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• If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

  John Fowles

  Lying, True Life, Want

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• Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

  John Fowles

  Children, Real, Writing

  John Fowles (1985). “A Maggot”, Jonathan Cape

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• The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.

  John Fowles

  Majority, Crafts, Modern

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• 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

  Wonderland, Being True, Felt

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

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• Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life on this planet.

  John Fowles

  Life, Attitude, Equality

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• That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

  John Fowles

  Sex, Men, Distinction

  1965 The Magus, ch.52.

  7 Copy quote

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