Quotes by 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.”

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

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”

“Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.”

“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.”

“He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, ...”

“Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.”

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”

“I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And ab...”

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.""I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.""You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray ...”

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the u...”

“Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one t...”

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

“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...”