John Fowles Quotes

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

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.

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.

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.

It’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.

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

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

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.

"The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love."

Just because you can’t express your feelings it doesn’t mean they’re not deep.

A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.

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

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.

"Ask me to marry you."

"Will you marry me?"

"No."