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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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"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."
"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written."
"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."
"Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination and concreteness."
"As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun."
"There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are."
Explore more quotes by John Fowles
"I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive."
"Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?"
"In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me."
"Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is."
"I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment."
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