438 Quotes by John Fowles

They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough – two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.

I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.

You don’t have any time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don’t go to silly films, even if you want to; you don’t read cheap newspapers; you don’t listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don’t waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.

Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way – they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.

I don’t think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.

What you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight – and smile at your own past sorrows.