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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.

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
Men
Practise
Essential
Essentials
Artist
Art
Doe
Whole

More quotes by John Fowles

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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
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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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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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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.
John Fowles
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
John Fowles
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If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
John Fowles
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
John Fowles