Quotes from John Fowles

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.

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.

If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

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.

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.

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

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.

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.

Between skin and skin, there is only light.

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.

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

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

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

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.