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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
Real
Different
World
Unreal
Novelists
Worlds
Two
Live

More quotes by John Fowles

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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
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I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
John Fowles
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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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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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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.
John Fowles
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
John Fowles
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If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
John Fowles
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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.
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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Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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