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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
Baseball
Cricket
Proud
Substitutes
War
Base
Beautiful
Highly
Stylized
Made
Greed
Chivalry
Chess
Mixture
Senses
Mixtures
Flesh
Medieval

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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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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.
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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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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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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.
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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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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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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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.
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He is solid immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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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