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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Novelists
Worlds
Two
Live
Real
Different
World
Unreal

More quotes by John Fowles

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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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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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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
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These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
John Fowles
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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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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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles