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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Night
Live
Come
Perversion
Great
Craving
Risk
Lasts
Last
Death
More quotes by John Fowles
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
John Fowles
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.
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
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
John Fowles
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
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
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
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
John Fowles
And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
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.
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
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
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles