John Fowles

“I needed a new mystery.”

“There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.”

“I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.”

“I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.”

“Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.”

“In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.”

“If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”

“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.”

“Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.”

“We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.”

“But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.”

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”

“Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”

“Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.”

“I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.”

“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.”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

“Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.”

“A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.”

“We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.”