John Fowles Quotes

I write because I can’t sleep.

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow.

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

It was impossible to sleep. Anxiety stopped me from falling asleep; depression woke me up.

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.

My manuscripts sleep, while I cannot, for I am covered with poultices.

My life has been regulated by insomnia.

I've dreamed a lot, but i'm not a very good sleeper.

He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly, helps pass the time, since it's impossible to kill.

Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

Insomnia is only mind over mattress.

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

What hath night to do with sleep?

So I take a little sleeping pill, pop it and realize nothing's happening - but something else was happening.

When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

"Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed... awake." Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. "I'm tired of sleeping."