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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

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
Writing
Reasons
Thing
Create
World
Common
Write
Reason
Need
Alternative
Many
Novelists
Needs
Alternatives

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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
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If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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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.
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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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.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles