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

John Fowles

art beautiful beauty bourgeois class classes despise feelings hatred horrid life love nasty passion refusal snob snobbish snobbishness thought thoughts truth

Related Quotes

That which we call a snob by any other name would still be snobbish

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Sometimes, the place is really beautiful, and, sometimes, it's just the person you are with that makes it so.

— Oussama Hedhli

BeautifulBeautyFeelings

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

— John Fowles

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

beautycontrolkidnap

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

— John Fowles