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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Made
Greed
Chivalry
Chess
Mixture
Senses
Mixtures
Flesh
Medieval
Baseball
Cricket
Proud
Substitutes
War
Base
Beautiful
Highly
Stylized

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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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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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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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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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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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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.
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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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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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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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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.
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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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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
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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.
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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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