John Fowles quotes

John Fowles was an English novelist and essayist, famous for works such as "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and "The Magus". His writing is known for its philosophical depth and experimentation with narrative structure. He influenced postmodern literature and continues to be widely studied and admired. Here are 131 of his quotes:

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

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

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.

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

John Fowles

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

John Fowles

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.

John Fowles

I am infinitely strange to myself.

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all...

John Fowles

...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.

John Fowles

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.

John Fowles

That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang.

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

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.

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

John Fowles

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

John Fowles

I didn't know at that time Emily Dickinson's great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets'; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.

John Fowles