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

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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
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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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
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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.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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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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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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