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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
Description
Chains
Held
Knew
Words
Back
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Taints
More quotes by John Fowles
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
John Fowles
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
John Fowles
Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
John Fowles
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
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.
John Fowles
Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles
The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles