John Fowles Quotes - Page 4

Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

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

I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.

The best wines take the longest to mature.

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.