John Fowles Quotes

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

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.

I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe - so long as it's something more than belief in your own comfort.

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

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.

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds.

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.

The best wines take the longest to mature.

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

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extroverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

"I want to tell you what's really happened."

"Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."

And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

"I say "her," but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face."