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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.

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
Given
Plan
Seems
Decided
Follow
Plans
Itinerary
Fiction
Woodland
Walks
Promising
Path
Entry
Point
Normally

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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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.
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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
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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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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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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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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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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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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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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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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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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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