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
Present
Live
Would
Depression
Mad
Illness

More quotes by 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
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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
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
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
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
Image
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
Image
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
John Fowles
Image
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
Image
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
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
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
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
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
Image
These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
John Fowles
Image
Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
Image
Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
John Fowles
Image
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles