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

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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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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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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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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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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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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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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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