John Fowles

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight__nd smile at your own past sorrows.

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.

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

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen.""I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. "Thank you.""It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

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

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

I want to tell you what's really happened.""Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.

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. I wanted the marvellous, 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 Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex.

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.

Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

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 fiction.