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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.

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
Ideas
Wives
Men
Attractive
Wife
Knowledge
Less
Idea
Others
Consoled
Women
Haunted

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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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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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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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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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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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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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.
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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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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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.
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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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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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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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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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