John Fowles Quotes

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

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

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

That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

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.

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

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.

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

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

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

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

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

Time is not a road - it is a room.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

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.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

Do you know that every great thing in the history 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?

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.