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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.

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
Tell
Lifeless
Nothing
Diary
Writing
Diaries
Trying
Alternative
Really
Alternatives
People
Totally
Garden
Creating
Leafless

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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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.
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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.
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
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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.
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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 profoundest distances are never geographical.
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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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