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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

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
True
Life
Start
Lying

More quotes by 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.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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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.
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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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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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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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.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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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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Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
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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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles