Quote

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

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
Needs
Alternatives
Writing
Reasons
Thing
Create
World
Common
Write
Reason
Need
Alternative
Many
Novelists

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
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
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
Image
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
Image
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
John Fowles
Image
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles
Image
Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
Image
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
John Fowles
Image
He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
Image
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
Image
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
John Fowles
Image
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
Image
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles