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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

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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
Wall
High
Literature
Age
Versailles
Hate
Builds
Art
Walls
Around
Personally
Made
Guilty

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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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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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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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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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Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
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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 talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
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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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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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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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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
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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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Science disembodies art embodies.
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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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