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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

John Fowles

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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Character
Live
Disobey
Characters
Begin
Events

More quotes by John Fowles

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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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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.
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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.
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Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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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.
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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.
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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He is solid immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
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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.
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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
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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
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles