Quote

If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

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
Start
Lying
True
Life

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
Image
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.
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
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
Image
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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
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
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
Image
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
Image
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
Image
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
Image
Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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
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
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
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
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 knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles