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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 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.
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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.
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The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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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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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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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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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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Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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