Quote

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

John Fowles

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Life
Answered
Oneself
Questions
Except
Philosophy
Anyone
Important
Never

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
Image
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
Image
If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
Image
Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
John Fowles
Image
I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
John Fowles
Image
Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
Image
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
John Fowles
Image
My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
John Fowles
Image
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
Image
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
Image
Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
Image
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
John Fowles
Image
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
John Fowles
Image
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles
Image
These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
John Fowles
Image
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
John Fowles
Image
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles