John Fowles Quotes

• One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

  John Fowles

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• The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

  John Fowles

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• Cricket remains for me the game of games, the sanspareil, the great metaphor, the best marriage ever devised of mind and body… For me it remains the Proust of pastimes, the subtlest and most poetic, the most past-and-present; whose beauty can lie equally in days, in a whole, or in one tiny phrase, a blinding split second.

  John Fowles

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• The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.

  John Fowles

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• In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.

  John Fowles

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• That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects… It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women—and absurd.

  John Fowles

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• All perfect republics are a perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night ?

  John Fowles

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• And 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

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

  John Fowles

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  Tags in Philosophy

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

  John Fowles

  Topics in God

  Tags in Freedom

• Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

  John Fowles

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  Tags in Women

• Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

  John Fowles

  Topics in Death

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

  John Fowles

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  Tags in Poetry

• We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

  John Fowles

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  Tags in Poetry

• There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

  John Fowles

• There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common – a need to create an alternative world.

  John Fowles

• The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

  John Fowles

• The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

  John Fowles

• That is the great distinction between the s*xes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

  John Fowles

• Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

  John Fowles

John Fowles (28)

Birth:	31st March, 1926
Death:	5th November, 2005
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Teacher

About

John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England. He was an English novelist of international stature, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and New College, Oxford. He spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the University of Poitiers. He wrote several novels include: The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot.

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