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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

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
Despise
Greatest
Effort

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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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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.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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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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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The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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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.
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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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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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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.
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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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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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