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John Fowles

73 quotes

“There are only two races on this planet — the intelligent and the stupid.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Daily Telegraph (15 August 1991)
“When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not numbers but know-how; this situation was apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even if we could feed a population twice the size of the present world population, and feed them better than they are fed now, there is no guarantee that such an overpopulated world would be happier than a properly populated one....the state of overpopulation turns progress into regress.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1977 edition)
“A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1977 edition)
“Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1977 edition)
“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 (1926–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1977 edition)
“It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1977 edition)
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviourism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I almost pity them [other women]. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing. I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a vivid Insight, a flash of black lightning, he [Charles] saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality — history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a moment, in that dark Dorset night, reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am infinitely strange to myself.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's all. Just paint. That's my advice. Leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean - indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source