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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 most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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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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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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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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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.
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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.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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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
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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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.
John Fowles
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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.
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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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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles