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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

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
Moral
Human
Humans
Matter
Atheist
Obligation
Atheism
Choice
Choices

More quotes by John Fowles

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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
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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.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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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.
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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.
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The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
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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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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
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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