Quotes from John Fowles

and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring

They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough—two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

Because I don't understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

She would give herself violently, then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day cleaning up the flat, cooking, ironing. Then, pass the next three or four Boheminanly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women's magazines, a detective story, Hemingway. Not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

Dünya bir genellikse benim hep bir istisna kalaca??m? buyuran bir ferman vard? sanki.

Beware of the waiting room. He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly, and leaned out to call after him, The what? He turned, but only to give a sharp wave, the Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn't get the smile on his face out of my mind, it secreted an omission. Something he'd saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room. Waiting room. Waiting room. It went round in my head all that evening.

Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no given 'right' reaction.

My only plea is that all artists have to range the full extent of their own lives freely. The rest of the world can censor and bury their private past. We cannot, and so have to remain partly green till the day we die… callow-green in the hope of becoming fertile-green.

But the one perfume you really want is freedom.

When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear (voyant trop pour nier et trop peu pour s'assurer) a healthy agnostic. What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would've been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist.

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.

If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist.

Era inútil. Ella había matado todo romance entre los dos, y se había convertido en una mujer cualquiera para mi. Como las demás. Ya había dejado de respetarla; ya nada quedaba de respetar en ella.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not.

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.

Man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got.

Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism,...

Eram prea necopt ca s? ?tiu c? cinismul de orice fel este o masc? pentru neputin?a de adaptare - pe scurt, un fel de impoten?? ?i c? a dispre?ui orice fel de efort este cel mai mare efort.

CunoaÈ™terea nu m-a f?cut fericit, m-a cuprins o furie surd? împotriva legii evoluÈ›iei, care acceptase ca în una È™i aceeaÈ™i minte s? existe atâta sensibilitate È™i atâta stâng?cie totodat?. În mine se revolta propriul eu ca un iepure în capcan?.

The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives.

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

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing, I love being to the full