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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
Poems
Poetry
Thousand
Past
Live
Things
Like
Pasts
Derive

More quotes by 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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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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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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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
John Fowles
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
John Fowles
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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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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
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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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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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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
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
John Fowles
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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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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.
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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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles