John Fowles
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.Collection: Nature
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.Collection: Poetry
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.Collection: Intelligence
In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.
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.
An answer is always a form of death.
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.
Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.
I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
The profoundest distances are never geographical.Collection: Distance
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.Collection: Lonely
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.Collection: Men
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.Collection: Love
Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.Collection: Atheist
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.Collection: Life
Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.Collection: Self
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.Collection: Want
Time is not a road - it is a room.Collection: Time
I am infinitely strange to myself.Collection: Strange
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.Collection: Thinking
Always we try to put the wild in a cage.Collection: Trying
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.Collection: God
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.Collection: Thinking
We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.Collection: Rewards
The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.Collection: Water
The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.Collection: Love
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?Collection: Beautiful
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.Collection: Alive
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.Collection: Girl
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.Collection: Men
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.Collection: Art
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.Collection: Cancer
I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.Collection: Stars
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.Collection: Hazards
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.Collection: Hurt
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.Collection: Passion
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.Collection: Girl
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?Collection: Night
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.Collection: Writing
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.Collection: Time
You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.Collection: Believe
Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.Collection: Sympathy
Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.Collection: Beautiful