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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

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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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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.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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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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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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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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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
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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
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If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
John Fowles
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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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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
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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