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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.

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
Contentment
Unknown
Content
Word
Also
Men
Life

More quotes by John Fowles

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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
John Fowles
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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?
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles