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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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
Duty
Corny
Trivial
Largely
Pretending
Consists
Critical
More quotes by John Fowles
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
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
John Fowles
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
He is solid immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
John Fowles
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
John Fowles
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
John Fowles
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
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
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
John Fowles
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
John Fowles
Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
John Fowles