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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

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
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The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
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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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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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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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.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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.
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles