Quotes from John Fowles

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

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.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

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.

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

In essence, the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.

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

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

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.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.