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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Seems
Decided
Follow
Plans
Itinerary
Fiction
Woodland
Walks
Promising
Path
Entry
Point
Normally
Given
Plan

More quotes by John Fowles

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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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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.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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.
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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.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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.
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Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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