John Fowles Quotes

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

I say whatever I want, I look whatever I want. That doesn't mean I don't question myself and feel insecure.

I'm pretty confident and, at the same time, I'm pretty insecure. I'm like a walking conflict.

You never know what's right, what you feel inside versus what is portrayed.

Like anybody, you have moments when you question yourself and you're insecure.

You get tangled up in your own ego of how you're perceived. You can lose your way.

I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

I'll be me, but I don't like it.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

I feel confidence in myself, but at the same time there's these cracks in the facade and those little things underneath that are unstable.

Successful people tend to feel simultaneously inadequate and superior.

The fundamental thing about my personality is that I think I'm an imposter.

People may see me as a luxurious star, but I am always thinking I can be represented by my psychological world that is fraught with vanity, loneliness, and always feels inadequate.

I can't do this because I can't...I can't be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this - this just becomes...another reminder of what I am not.

no one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any

... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.

No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.

When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.

You know your inside, and you know the others' outside: that creates jealousy. They know your outside, and they know their inside: that creates jealousy. Nobody else knows your inside. There you know you are nothing, worthless. And the others on the outside look so smiling. Their smiles may be phony, but how can you know that they are phony? Maybe their hearts are also smiling. You know your smile is phony, because your heart is not smiling at all, it may be crying and weeping.

If you don't feel good about something, you don't shake it off easily.

A guilty conscience never feels secure.

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Standing alone,eager to just believe,it's good enough to be what you really are,but in your heart,uncertainty forever lies,and you'll always be,somewhere on the outside.