John Fowles Quotes

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.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

There are only two races on this planet — the intelligent and the stupid.

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

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

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.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Sometimes I almost pity them. 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.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.

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

8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.

All good science is art. And all good art is science.

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.