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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

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
Disobey
Characters
Begin
Events
Character
Live

More quotes by John Fowles

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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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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 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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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.
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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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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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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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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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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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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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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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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.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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.
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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.
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