John Fowles Quotes

I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted.

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those fir...

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

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.

Ne considera, pe mine si pe fete, imaturi si naivi, dar noi ne puteam dovedi de zece ori mai perfizi decat el, tocmai pentru ca eram englezi - nascuti pentru a purta masca si educati de mici sa mintim...

Pero ya entonces me parecía muy lejana, aunque no en la distancia ni en el tiempo, sino en alguna dimensión para la que no tenemos nombre. En la realidad, quizás.

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.

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

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.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

There were minutes of silence then and in them I thought about the only truth that mattered, the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. When Lily de Seitas had told me her version...

Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a...

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

Viva. Pero viva a la manera en que está viva la muerte.

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countles...

Ненавистная тирания слабых [...].Ординарность – бич цивилизации.Но он настолько ординарен, что это делает его неординарным.

Она хорошая, хорошая, но ее любопытство стягивает меня, как сеть. Я - будто уродливый паразит, который может существовать лишь при удачном стечении обстоятельств, в неком непрочном симбиозе. Те, что н...

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

But everything beyond what he pays for and sees himself get is suspicious to him. He doesn't believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He's the one in prison; in his own hateful nar...

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that mo...