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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
Provincial
Romance
Mystery
Trouble
Everyone
Life

More quotes by John Fowles

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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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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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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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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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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
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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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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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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.
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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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.
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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.
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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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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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.
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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.
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles