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

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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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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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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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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
John Fowles
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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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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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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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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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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.
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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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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.
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
John Fowles
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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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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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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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