Best Quotes by John Fowles (Top 10)

  1. The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
  2. I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.
  3. The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
  4. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
  5. We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
  6. I am infinitely strange to myself.
  7. The profoundest distances are never geographical.
  8. There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
  9. I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
  10. One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

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