I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something, and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter anymore.

— John Fowles

I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitations of the bourgeoisie.(...) The New People are still the poor people, it is the new form of poverty. The others hadn't any money and these haven't any soul.

— John Fowles

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. Furthermore, I wanted the marvelous, the fantastic ordinariness of him. His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives; the people he loves always remember him. I've always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what he would be like in bed. I look at their mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed. Even Toilette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex.

— John Fowles

I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.’ ‘I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.

— John Fowles

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. Furthermore, I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

— John Fowles

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

— John Fowles

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

— John Fowles

I needed a new mystery.

— John Fowles