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John Robert Fowles war ein britischer Romanautor.

John Fowles studierte Sprachen an der Universität Oxford und arbeitete als Lehrer, bevor er sich seit 1964 ausschließlich dem Schreiben von Romanen widmete. Seine erfolgreichsten Bücher – „Die Geliebte des französischen Leutnants“ und „Daniel Martin“ – kommen auf den ersten Blick als historische Erzählungen daher, bergen aber eine Vielzahl von historischen und gesellschaftskritischen Einsichten und lassen sich auch als Beschreibungen der condition humaine im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert lesen. Gleiches gilt für die oberflächlich als Kriminalgeschichten angelegten Romane „Die Grille“ und „Der Sammler“, in denen die Anomie-Problematik und die prinzipielle Abgründigkeit menschlichen Handelns thematisiert werden. In „Mantissa“ stellt Fowles in dem Dialog mit einer der Musen der griechischen Mythologie seine Poetik dar.

„Der Magus“ – lange als sein Hauptwerk betrachtet – stellt die Themen Freiheit und Willensfreiheit in den Mittelpunkt und fragt nach der Möglichkeit von Erkenntnis an sich. Alle Romane von Fowles sind gekennzeichnet durch den Zweifel an der wahrgenommenen Realität, wie er auch im philosophischen Konstruktivismus gepflegt wird.

John Fowles lebte in Lyme Regis in Dorset. Er starb an Krebs.

✵ 31. März 1926 – 5. November 2005  •  Andere Namen جان فاولز
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John Fowles: Zitate auf Englisch

“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Quelle: The Magus (1965), Ch. 18

“You use your life.”

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John Fowles buch The Collector

The Collector

“I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“There are only two races on this planet — the intelligent and the stupid.”

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John Fowles

As quoted in Daily Telegraph (15 August 1991)

“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Quelle: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 2, Games

“We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Quelle: The Magus (1965), Ch. 27

“When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”

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John Fowles buch The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

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

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“He’s so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it’s a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people.”

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John Fowles buch The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Quelle: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 1, p. 1

“If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“(The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility…a sere notifier of what is.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me…I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

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

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John Fowles buch The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Paint. Just paint. This is my advice. And leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.”

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John Fowles buch The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower (1974)

“…even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals … A visual is more interested in style than in content … A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.”

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John Fowles buch The Aristos

The Aristos (1964)

“Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“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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John Fowles buch The Magus

Quelle: The Magus (1965), Ch. 17

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