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

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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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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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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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.
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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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.
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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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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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles