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

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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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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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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.
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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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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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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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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.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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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.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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