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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

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
Ever
Great
Supremely
Men
Ironic
Mets
Deal
Deals
Stupid
Taught

More quotes by John Fowles

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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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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
John Fowles
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I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
John Fowles
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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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 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
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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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These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
John Fowles
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles