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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
Begin
Events
Character
Live
Disobey
Characters
More quotes by John Fowles
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
John Fowles
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
The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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
Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
John Fowles
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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
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
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
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