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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
Character
Live
Disobey
Characters
Begin
Events

More quotes by John Fowles

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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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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.
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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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
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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
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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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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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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
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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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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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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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.
John Fowles
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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles