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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
Degrade
Lonely
Oneself
Effort
Sometimes
Degrades

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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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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?
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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
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Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
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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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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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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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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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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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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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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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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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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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 knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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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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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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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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