Quotessence
Home / Authors / John Fowles
John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllMenWorldIfsLifePeopleArtKnowsThinkingWarBeautifulLovePastSexWritingFeelingsHateJohn FowlesThe MagusDeathWant

Famous John Fowles Quotes

“Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?”

LifeYearsArtImportantYoungKnowledgeVirtueGoodnessIdealsExperienceBetrayalGoodCharmBetrayFrankVirtuousBetrayedUnderstandOldBurstingFranknessIdealOlderTrivialYounger
Book:The Collector
Create image

“I want to paint like Berthe Morisot, I don’t mean with her colours or forms or anything physical, but with her simplicity and light. I don’t want to be clever or great or “significant” or given all that clumsy masculine analysis. I want to paint sunlight on children’s faces, or flowers in a hedge or a street after April rain. The essences. Not the things themselves. Swimmings of light on the smallest things. Or am I being sentimental? Depressed. I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From what I want to be.”

Art
Book:The Collector
Create image

“You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story 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?”

LoveLifeArtFeelingsTruthBeautifulPassionBeautyClassThoughtsHatredThoughtDespiseNastyRefusalBourgeoisSnobSnobbishClassesSnobbishnessHorrid
Book:The Collector
Create image

“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 any more.”

PeopleArtHateNamesIndividualForgetLivingPainterCollectorsImpressionismCubismNamingCollectClassifyDrawerImpressionistCubist
Book:The Collector
Create image