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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

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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
Nice
Understand
Beautiful
Good
Things
Think
Thinking
Nasty
Ugly

More quotes by 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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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles