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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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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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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?
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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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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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
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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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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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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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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
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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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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles