John Fowles Quotes

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

Cricket remains for me the game of games, the sanspareil, the great metaphor, the best marriage ever devised of mind and body… For me it remains the Proust of pastimes, the subtlest and most poetic, the most past-and-present; whose beauty can lie equally in days, in a whole, or in one tiny phrase, a blinding split second.

The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.

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

All perfect republics are a perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night ?