To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

— John Fowles

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

— John Fowles

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

— John Fowles

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 presenters and from our individual presenters.

— John Fowles

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

— John Fowles

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favorite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boy, but you really think you're different.

— John Fowles

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it is dies

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles