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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

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
Romance
Mystery
Trouble
Everyone
Life
Provincial

More quotes by John Fowles

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There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
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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 dead live. How do they live? By love.
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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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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
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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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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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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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.
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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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
John Fowles
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
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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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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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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.
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