“ I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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“ She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan.
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
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“ The past not only changed, but changed continuously.
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
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“ I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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“ We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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“ She had the profound optimism of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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“ 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. They served as a substitute for experience.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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“ Life was the correct apparatus; it was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne, here and now.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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