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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

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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
Even
Insects
Things
Mercy
Think
Beyond
Thinking
Bits
Dies
Live
Nothing

More quotes by 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.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
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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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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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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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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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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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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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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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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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.
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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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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