Quote

To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

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
Despise
Greatest
Effort

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
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?
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
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
Image
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
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
John Fowles
Image
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
Image
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
Image
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
Image
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
Image
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
Image
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
John Fowles
Image
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
John Fowles
Image
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
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
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
Image
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
Image
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles