Quote

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

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
Sometimes
Degrades
Degrade
Lonely
Oneself
Effort

More quotes by 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
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
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
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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
Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
Image
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John Fowles
Image
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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
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
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
John Fowles
Image
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
John Fowles
Image
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
Image
The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
Image
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
Image
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
Image
Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
Image
You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles