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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

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
Illusion
Society
Live
People
Liking
Cherish

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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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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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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 most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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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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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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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 pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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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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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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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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The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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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