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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
Cynicism
Despise
Mask
Green
Failure
Short
Masks
Greatest
Impotence
Effort
Cope
More quotes by John Fowles
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles
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
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
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
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
John Fowles
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
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
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
Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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
I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
John Fowles
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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
Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
