438 Quotes by John Fowles

I have hope. But it’s all an illusion.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you.

As if I’d lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I’d done was to see his real face by it.

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

Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.

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?

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.