438 Quotes by 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.

If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist.

The honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

Ни пантеизма, ни гуманизма. Но нечто гораздо более объемное, безразличное и непостижимое. Эта реальность пребывала в вечном взаимодействии. Не добро и не зло; не красота и не безобразие. Ни влечения ни неприязни. Только взаимодействие.

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.