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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

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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
Like
King
Picture
Kings
Saws
Read
Reality
Long
Medieval
Love
Fallen

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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.
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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.
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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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.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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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.
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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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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.
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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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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.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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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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.
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