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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
Knew
Words
Back
Like
Taints
Description
Chains
Held

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I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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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 read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
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The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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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.
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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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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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