John Fowles Quotes - Page 3

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.

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.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

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

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.

He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

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.

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

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.

To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.