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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.

John Fowles

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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Taints
Description
Chains
Held
Knew
Words
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
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I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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