John Fowles
John Fowles
John Robert Fowleswas an English novelist of international stature, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. His work reflects the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 March 1926
life heart sitting
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.
mean one-day wish
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.
kings reality long
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.
forget happens
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
night risk lasts
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
mirrors suffering greece
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
sight desolation whole
Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
hate jealous mean
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
strange
I am infinitely strange to myself.
educational successful soldier
Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.
accepting ought
Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.
misery century lack-of-time
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.
love sex men
The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.
passion men soul
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.