Quotes from John Fowles

There are three types of intelligent persons: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see that he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind.

Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe - so long as it's something more than belief in your own comfort.

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.

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

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone -- had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.

I needed a new mystery.

Between skin and skin there is only light. And there was my poetry.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

All of us are failures; we all die. Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core. We all like to be loved or hated; it is a sign that we shall be remembered, that we did not 'not exist'. For this reason, many unable to create love have created hate. That too is remembered.

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 monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness. The black and the black and the black.