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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

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
Degrades
Degrade
Lonely
Oneself
Effort
Sometimes

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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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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 many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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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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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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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.
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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?
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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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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.
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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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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