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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
Like
Taints
Description
Chains
Held
Knew
Words
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More quotes by John Fowles

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If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
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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.
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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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I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
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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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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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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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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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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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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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.
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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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.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles