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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
Trouble
Everyone
Life
Provincial
Romance
Mystery

More quotes by 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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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
John Fowles
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
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Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
John Fowles
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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.
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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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
John Fowles
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
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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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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles