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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

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
Human
Humans
Things
Decent
Accepting

More quotes by John Fowles

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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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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.
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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.
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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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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
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.
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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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
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Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
John Fowles
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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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I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
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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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
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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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles