John Fowles

There are two kinds of hangover in one you feel ill and incapable in the other you feel ill and lucid.

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

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

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

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

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

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

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

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

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes chess made flesh a mixture of proud chivalry and base in both senses greed.

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.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

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

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

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

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

An answer is always a form of death.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.