Home > Work > The Collector

The Collector QUOTES

The Collector QUOTES

1 " When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies "

― John Fowles , The Collector

2 " Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

3 " Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that? "

― John Fowles , The Collector

4 " I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

5 " I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

6 " The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

7 " You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that? "

― John Fowles , The Collector

8 " Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

9 " Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that? "

― John Fowles , The Collector

10 " But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

11 " I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

12 " This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.
All in vain. All wasted.
The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.
More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

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

― John Fowles , The Collector

14 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

15 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

16 " If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

17 " People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.
The black and the black and the black. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

18 " It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

19 " I hate beyond hate. "

― John Fowles , The Collector

20 " I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human. "

― John Fowles , The Collector