John Fowles Quotes

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

'Modelland' has always been a part of my mind and my heart. I'm excited that you'll be able to read about this magical world that's been living in my dreams for so many years.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

Science fiction is like a blender - you can put in any historical experience and take influences from everything you see, read or experience.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

I'm removed in my real life, and unable to express certain things face to face. So I have always found myself in this fantasy world. That's why I started writing songs and stories from a very young age. I'd much rather walk around anonymously cooking up tales than face the people that I have known forever.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

I like fictional stories - like, things that never happened but the seed of it starts as real.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.