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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

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
Poems
Poetry
Thousand
Past
Live
Things
Like
Pasts
Derive

More quotes by John Fowles

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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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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.
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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
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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
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
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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.
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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
John Fowles
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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
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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.
John Fowles
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
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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
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles