John Fowles Quotes - Page 6

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.

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

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. 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.

It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

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

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.

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

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.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

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.

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.

There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.

Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.

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

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

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.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

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