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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 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.
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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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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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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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Science disembodies art embodies.
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
John Fowles
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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
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There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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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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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles