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
Degrades
Degrade
Lonely
Oneself
Effort
Sometimes

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
John Fowles
Image
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
Image
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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
If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
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
Image
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
Image
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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
Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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
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
I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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
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
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 dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles