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He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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
Back
Behind
Worlds
Writing
Ones
Warm
Simply
Cool
World
Dark
Civilization
Words
Poet
Suspension
Write
Mystery
Neat
Felt
Outside
Poems
Two
Behinds
Poets

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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
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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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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 profoundest distances are never geographical.
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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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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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
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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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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
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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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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles