Quote

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.

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
Women
Haunted
Ideas
Wives
Men
Attractive
Wife
Knowledge
Less
Idea
Others
Consoled

More quotes by 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
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.
John Fowles
Image
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
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
Image
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
Image
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
Image
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
Image
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
Image
Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
Image
And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
Image
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
Image
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles