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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Writing
Contradictory
Really
Attempts
Apparently
Escape
Suicide
Commit
Poetry
Write

More quotes by John Fowles

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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
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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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.
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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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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.
John Fowles
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
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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
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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
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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 dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles
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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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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
John Fowles
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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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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
John Fowles