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That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

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
Men
Tragedy
Courage
Millions
Evil
Good

More quotes by 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 you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
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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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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
John Fowles
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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.
John Fowles
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
John Fowles
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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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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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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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
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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.
John Fowles
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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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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles