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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
Sense
Myth
Injustices
Injustice
Bred
Oneself
Gross
Choose
Primaries
American
Primary
Simple
Republic
Free
Optimistic
Absurdly
Social
Assumption
Dominates
More quotes by John Fowles
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
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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?
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
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
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
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
The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
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
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
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
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
