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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

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
Society
Live
People
Liking
Cherish
Illusion

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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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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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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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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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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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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Science disembodies art embodies.
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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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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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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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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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.
John Fowles