what you do blurs over what you did before.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

— John Fowles

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any…

— John Fowles

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty. As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or…

— John Fowles

“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.

— John Fowles

“Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see…

— John Fowles

The best wines take the longest to mature.

— John Fowles

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty…

— John Fowles

“Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew…

— John Fowles