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.

— John Fowles

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

— John Fowles

That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.

— John Fowles

The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.

— John Fowles

Paint. Just paint. This is my advice. And leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.

— John Fowles

The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her.

— John Fowles

The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma - human or divine - can deminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.

— John Fowles

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

— John Fowles

Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity.

— John Fowles

He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…

— John Fowles

(The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility...a sere notifier of what is.

— John Fowles

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all...

— John Fowles

I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.

— John Fowles

I was not a poet. I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin.

— John Fowles

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum.

— John Fowles

I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.

— John Fowles

I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

— John Fowles

Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand.

— John Fowles

We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

— John Fowles

If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval.

— John Fowles

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.

— John Fowles

She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.

— John Fowles

She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls.

— John Fowles

The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.

— John Fowles

Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view...

— John Fowles

It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man...

— John Fowles

You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient." "I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.

— John Fowles

All good science is art. And all good art is science.

— John Fowles

I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory.

— John Fowles

I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors…the eyes of a machine. An educated machine… I realised he was drinking less than we were…And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist… Also that Anton was careless with his tongue...

— John Fowles

There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..

— John Fowles

Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical...

— John Fowles

Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians...

— John Fowles

So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga...

— John Fowles

Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.

— John Fowles

I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.

— John Fowles

I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it...A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return...

— John Fowles

Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?

— John Fowles

By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

— John Fowles

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'

— 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.

— John Fowles

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.

— John Fowles

Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.'

— John Fowles

There are only two races on this planet — the intelligent and the stupid.

— John Fowles

I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn’t really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline — and me. But of course, he is right. They’re anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything.

— John Fowles

He’s so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it’s a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people.

— John Fowles

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care.

— John Fowles

I don’t think the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has much chance of actually affecting the government. It’s one of the first things you have to face up to. But we do it to keep our self-respect to show to ourselves, each one to himself or herself, that we care. And to let other people, all the lazy, sulky, hopeless ones like you, know that someone cares. We’re trying to shame you into thinking about it, about acting.

— John Fowles

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

— John Fowles

...even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals … A visual is more interested in style than in content … A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

— John Fowles

There’s a card in the Tarot pack called The Magus. The magician, conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose.

— John Fowles

I do not defend Conchis’ decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are totally anti-pathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realise now that they do sometimes with good reason. True freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore is never absolute freedom.

— John Fowles

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

— John Fowles