Quotes by John Fowles

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 above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

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

Shes always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet. Prose and pudding?I dont expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

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

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows hes in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. Ive more knowledge of life than you, Ive lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see whats trivial and whats important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I dont want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. Im not a good man. Perhaps morally Im younger even than you are. Can you understand that?

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 a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.

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 didnt betray his self.You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

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 universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

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 that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

...Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-mans-land between surrealism and communism,...

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Cant you understand? I dont 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.

I am one in a row of specimens. Its when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. Im meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but its the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

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 things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, dont you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story 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 love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

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.(...)The New People are still the poor people, it is the new form of poverty. The others hadnt any money and these havent any soul.

Arts 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 love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint its no go if your personality isnt worth translating.