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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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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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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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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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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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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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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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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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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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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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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles