Quote

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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Hate
Meant
Beautiful
Line
Part
Dead
Trying
Wants
Always
Lines
Specimens
Alive
Flutter
Beauty
Pinned
Living
Hates

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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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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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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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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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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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The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
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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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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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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 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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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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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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