All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John FowlesRead
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Novelists write to express their creativity and share different perspectives through imagined worlds.
This quote by John Fowles captures the essence of novel writing, highlighting that while various motivations can drive authors, the fundamental purpose remains the same: to build and inhabit alternative realities. This creative process allows writers to delve into new ideas, explore human experiences, and provide readers with diverse landscapes that challenge their perceptions of the world.
Themes
NovelistsWritingCreativityAlternative WorldsImagination
In practice
Example use cases
A writer's workshop where participants discuss the importance of creativity in storytelling.
More from John Fowles
All quotes →I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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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?
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The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
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It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.
John FowlesRead
It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.
John FowlesRead
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It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression - to express reality through reality.
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