438 Quotes by John Fowles

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse. It is quintessentially 'wild' ... unphilosophical, irrational uncontrollable, incalculable.

Their fear of the open and of the naked. Hide reality, shut out nature. The revolutionary art movement of Charles's day was of course the Pre-Raphaelite. They, at least, were making an attempt to admit nature and sexuality.

Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

Then she did something as strange, as shocking, as if she had thrown off her clothes.She smiled.

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.