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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
Point
Normally
Given
Plan
Seems
Decided
Follow
Plans
Itinerary
Fiction
Woodland
Walks
Promising
Path
Entry

More quotes by John Fowles

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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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Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
John Fowles
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
John Fowles
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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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.
John Fowles
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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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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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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
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