John Fowles
You're not me. You can't feel like I feel." "I can feel." "No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine." "It's not fine. It's just not so bad.Collection: Fine
Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.Collection: Will You Marry Me
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.Collection: Stupid
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.Collection: Mirrors
There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.Collection: Hangover
An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.Collection: Modern
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.Collection: Music
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Writing
It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.Collection: Silly
The best wines take the longest to mature.Collection: Wine
All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.Collection: Past
It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I didCollection: Writing
He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.Collection: Memories
On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.Collection: Writing
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.Collection: Mean
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.Collection: People
There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.Collection: Hazards
But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.Collection: Nature
The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.' 'I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.' He turned. 'You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy.'Collection: Men
My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.Collection: Book
...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.Collection: Cynicism
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.Collection: Knowing
And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.Collection: Depression
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.Collection: Fixed
I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.Collection: Kings
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.Collection: Years
There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.Collection: World
Science disembodies; art embodies.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Hate
Death is the room that is always empty.Collection: Rooms
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.Collection: Fiction
People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.Collection: Beautiful
Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.Collection: Nature
Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.Collection: Men
How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?Collection: Self
Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.Collection: War
Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.Collection: Art
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.Collection: Character
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.Collection: Life
Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.Collection: Envy
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.Collection: Fighting
Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.Collection: Angel
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.Collection: Real
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.Collection: Atheist
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.Collection: Art
It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.Collection: Life