Quotes by John Fowles

“You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come whe...”

“I want to tell you what's really happened.""Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.”

“In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.”

“A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.”

“I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitations of the bourgeoisie.(....”

“For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.”

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

“Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by l...”

“But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.”

“I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. Thats what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist ...”

“I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.”

“Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is...”

“Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and l...”

“We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is t...”

“Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray fo...”

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair t...”

“The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.”

“You're not me. You can't feel like I feel.""I can feel.""No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine.""It's not fine. It's just not so bad.”

“...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenants Woman ”

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