John Fowles Quotes - Page 2

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

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

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.

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.'

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.

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.

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.

There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

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.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

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

Science disembodies; art embodies.

Death is the room that is always empty.

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.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

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.

Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?

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

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