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.

— John Fowles

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

— John Fowles

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

— John Fowles

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immoralities.

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

— John Fowles

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was in congenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

— John Fowles

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was in congenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

— John Fowles

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.

— John Fowles

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

— John Fowles