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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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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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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.
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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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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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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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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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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
John Fowles