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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.
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
American
Primary
Simple
Republic
Free
Optimistic
Absurdly
Social
Assumption
Dominates
Sense
Myth
Injustices
Injustice
Bred
Oneself
Gross
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Primaries
More quotes by John Fowles
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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
Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
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
Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
John Fowles
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
John Fowles
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
John Fowles
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
Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
John Fowles
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles
