Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time. — John Fowles Copy Share Image
All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“If you are wise, you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science,… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses,… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“She would give herself violently, then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day cleaning up the flat, cooking,… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future.… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure;… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure,… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.” — John Fowles Copy Share Image
Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want. — John Fowles Copy Share Image
That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects. — John Fowles Copy Share Image
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night? — John Fowles Copy Share Image
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. — John Fowles Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
