John Fowles Quotes

“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.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“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.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“When you love me, it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.”
― John Fowles

“She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.
'You're being very silent.'
'That's how men cry.”
― John Fowles, Daniel Martin

“We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.”
― John Fowles, Daniel Martin

“Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.”
― John Fowles, Daniel Martin

“Laziness, I am afraid, was Charles's distinguishing trait.”
― John Fowles

“He knew he was overfastidious. But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing all the available space?
You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.”
― John Fowles

“Nothing is real. All is fiction. Somewhere there’s someone writing us, we’re not real. He or she decides who we are, what we do, all about us.”
― John Fowles, The Enigma

“The maze has no centre. An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip of the cutting shears.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Though one can accept, and still not forgive; and one can decide, and still not enact the decision.”
― John Fowles, The Magus