Quotes by John Fowles

“I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.""I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. "Thank you.""It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.”

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

“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 att...”

“Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.”

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.”

“...Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism,...”

“Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.”

“Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.”

“I love honesty and freedom and giving. 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.”

“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 beauti...”

“I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being al...”

“You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, you...”

“Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new C...”

“He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.”

“The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of thin...”

“You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thou...”

“Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is burst...”

“Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.”

“I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.”

“I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him. His promiscuity is creati...”