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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
Great
Craving
Risk
Lasts
Last
Death
Night
Live
Come
Perversion

More quotes by 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 great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
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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These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
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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
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
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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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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
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles