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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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Past
Live
Things
Like
Pasts
Derive
Poems
Poetry
Thousand

More quotes by John Fowles

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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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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
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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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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.
John Fowles
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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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?
John Fowles
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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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Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
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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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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles