Quote

And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

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
Live
Would
Depression
Mad
Illness
Present

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
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
If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
Image
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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
All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
Image
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles
Image
Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
John Fowles
Image
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
Image
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
Image
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
Image
Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
Image
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
Image
We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
Image
He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
Image
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
Image
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles
Image
I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles