John Fowles

“Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your…

— John Fowles

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

— John Fowles

“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses,…

— John Fowles

“if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the…

— John Fowles

The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

— John Fowles

“He makes me change, he makes me want to dance round him, bewilder him, dazzle him, dumbfound him. He' so slow, so…

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

— John Fowles

“Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling…

— John Fowles

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare…

— John Fowles

“She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end…

— John Fowles

“Now I understand why you grow so many flowers." She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, "To cover the stink of…

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet…

— John Fowles

“A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires…

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

“what you do blurs over what you did before.”

— John Fowles

“Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound…

— John Fowles

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or…

— John Fowles

“Come clean Charles, come clean”

— John Fowles

“The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a…

— John Fowles

“In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and…

— John Fowles

“That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.”

— John Fowles