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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 did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things."
"There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are."
"If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient. [25 February 2010]"
"It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project."
"You do everything by the book, like everybody else, you get the same results s everybody else."
"Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition."
"Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination and concreteness."
"The practice of forgiving is a sequential practice that begins with excusing someone."
"All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue."
Explore more quotes by John Fowles
"There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be."
"We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away."
"A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless."
"I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death."
"To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape."
"Russia itself having turned to socialist realism - no-man's-land between surrealism and communism."
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