John Fowles Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.
It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

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 above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

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.

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 attractive souls.

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

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.

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

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 beautiful.

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

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

– Ух какой громадный, – пробормотала она.