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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Despise
Mask
Green
Failure
Short
Masks
Greatest
Impotence
Effort
Cope
Cynicism

More quotes by John Fowles

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The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
John Fowles
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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.
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
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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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
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.
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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 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
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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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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.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles