Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Tragedy
Courage
Millions
Evil
Good
Men
More quotes by John Fowles
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
John Fowles
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
I am infinitely strange to myself.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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
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
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
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
Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
John Fowles
Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
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
Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
