Quotes by John Fowles

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

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.

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 College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Robs Bookshop.

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, youve got that ability. So have thousands.

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 when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight—and smile at your own past sorrows.

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.

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 for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.Youre being very silent.Thats how men cry.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships 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 absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.

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 lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.

Wolves dont hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.

I suppose Id had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasnt ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My technique was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.

I needed a new mystery.

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

If there is a God hes a great loathsome spider in the darkness.