John Fowles

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious; because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.”

“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the ki...”

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”

“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”

“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 ficti...”

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

“She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to...”

“Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.”

“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 k...”

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”

“Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.”

“I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation....”

“Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

“Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.”

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

“Я мог бы влюбиться в неё по уши и стал бы невыносимо требовательным, предъявляя на неё собственные права; но я слишком часто грешил этим прежде, чтобы не знать, что стремление лишить партнёр...”

“Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable....”

“I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.”

“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.”

“The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”