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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
Two
Live
Real
Different
World
Unreal
Novelists
Worlds

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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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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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Science disembodies art embodies.
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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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.
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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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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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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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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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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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.
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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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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?
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
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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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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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