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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Persons
Atheist
Person
Intelligence
Intelligent
Physical
Either
Automatic
Courses
Agnostic
Course
Coward
High
Definitions

More quotes by John Fowles

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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
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.
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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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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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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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
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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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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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.
John Fowles
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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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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
John Fowles
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
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.
John Fowles