438 Quotes by John Fowles

Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed – thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes – because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself – and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.? To live alone?? To live. With what you are.

One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true.

You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else.

We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.

I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

The truth was she couldn’t do ugly things. She was too beautiful.

Successful artistic parents seem very rarely to give birth to equally successful artistic sons and daughters, and I suspect it may be because the urge to create, which must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality, is better fostered – despite modern educational theory – not by a sympathetic and ‘creative’ childhood environment, but the very opposite, by pruning and confining natural instinct.