Quotes by John Fowles

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

“Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters.”

“Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.”

“Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of ...”

“What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.”

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

“Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

“Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance ...”

“Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.”

“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to ...”

“I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those ...”

“It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.”

“When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' sh...”

“The world began in hazard and will end in it.”

“An answer is always a form of death.”

“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.”

“In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.”

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.”

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