100 Quotes By John Fowles, The Author Of The Magus
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist of international stature. Having lived a conventional family life as an oppressively conformist in early 1930s, Fowles wanted to escape from the English suburb culture. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Royal Marines for 2 years. He desperately wanted to participate in the war, but it ended before he could go into combat. After completing his education from the Oxford University, he taught English at the University of Poiters. Thereafter, he transferred to Anorgyrios College at Spetsai in Greece. He was inspired to write 'The Magus' that described the experimental philosophy and hippie anarchism of the 1960s. It instantly turned into a bestseller. This was followed by impressive fiction and non-fiction works including 'The Ebony Tower', 'A Maggot', 'Mantissa' and 'Daniel Martin'. As an author, he was influenced by Camus and Sartre and was critically positioned between postmodernism and modernism era. In 1966, he imagined a beautiful woman dressed in black Victorian attire, standing on the dock and staring out at the sea. He became obsessed with the idea that led him to write 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (1969). The Times included Fowles on the list of '50 greatest British authors' since 1945. Fowles was a man of wisdom, which is evident through his quotes that have come up through his characters and his own life. We have curated some of his best quotes from his writings, books, essays and speeches. A selection of John Robert Fowles quotes about human life, love, poetry, passion, marriage, women, men, war and much more.
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
I am infinitely strange to myself.
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.
You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
