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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

John Fowles

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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Life
Answered
Oneself
Questions
Except
Philosophy
Anyone
Important
Never

More quotes by John Fowles

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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
John Fowles
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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.
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
John Fowles
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He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
John Fowles
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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
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Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
John Fowles
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The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
John Fowles
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
John Fowles
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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
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Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
John Fowles