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"And like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring."
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"Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew."

"And is usually true of a man of one idea, [Charles] became obsessed."

"The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to-instead of them-change reality."

"There is no such thing as a boring person when you are lonely or extremely bored."

"I am a mask, concealing the real."

"To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic."

"The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from."

"Happiness is something that you establish before a relationship. It is not the relationship that establishes it first."

"Comparison more than reality makes men happy or wretched."

"We all can give in to our inner critic. I don't know about you, but I would never allow anyone to speak to me the way I speak to myself! I wouldn't be their friend!"
Explore more quotes by John Fowles


"I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human."


"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."


"He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands."


"Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop."


"This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.All in vain. All wasted.The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain."


"I left a pause. 'You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.' 'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."


"Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care."


"Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters."
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