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We All Write Poems; It Is Simply That Poets Are The Ones Who Write In Words.
-John Fowles
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We All Write Poems;

John Fowles
...
We All Write Poems; It Is Simply That Poets Are The Ones Who Write In Words.

Understanding the Quote: "we all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones..."

This quote by John Fowles reflects deeply on the theme of writing. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Writing, Reading Poetry, Poetry, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how John Fowles interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About John Fowles

John Fowles is celebrated for insightful thoughts on writing and reading poetry. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Writing
Reading Poetry
Poetry
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Wealth Is A Monster. It Takes A Month To Learn To Control It Financially. And Many Years To Learn To Control It Psychologically.
Years
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Science Disembodies; Art Embodies.
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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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On The Whole, Dialogue Is The Most Difficult Thing, Without Any Doubt. It's Very Difficult, Unfortunately. You Have To Detach Yourself From The Notion Of A Lifelike Quality. You See, Actually Lifelike, Tape-recorded Dialogue Like This Has Very Little To Do With Good Novel Dialogue. It's A Matter Of Getting That Awful Tyranny Of Mimesis Out Of Your Mind, Which Is Difficult.
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No Amount Of Reading And Intelligent Deduction Could Supplant The Direct Experience.
Reading
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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 Don't Think The English Like Me. I Sold A Colossal Best Seller In America, And They Never Really Forgave Me.
Thinking
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Like Me
Men Love War Because It Allows Them To Look Serious. Because It Is The One Thing That Stops Women Laughing At Them.
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Duty Largely Consists Of Pretending That The Trivial Is Critical.
Corny
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Duty
All Pasts Are Like Poems; One Can Derive A Thousand Things, But Not Live In Them.
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Our Accepting What We Are Must Always Inhibit Our Being What We Ought To Be.
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The Supposed Great Misery Of Our Century Is The Lack Of Time; Our Sense Of That, Not A Disinterested Love Of Science, And Certainly Not Wisdom, Is Why We Devote Such A Huge Proportion Of The Ingenuity And Income Of Our Societies To Finding Faster Ways Of Doing Things - As If The Final Aim Of Mankind Was To Grow Closer Not To A Perfect Humanity, But To A Perfect Lightning-flash.
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Ask Me To Marry You." "will You Marry Me?" "no.
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The More Abhorrent A News Item The More Comforting It Was To Be The Recipient, Since The Fact That It Had Happened Elsewhere Proved That It Had Not Happened Here, Was Not Happening Here, And Would Therefore Never Happen Here.
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Forgetting’s Not Something You Do, It Happens To You. Only It Didn’t Happen To Me.
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Think. In A Minute From Now You Could Be Saying, I Risked Death. I Threw For Life, And I Won Life. It Is A Very Wonderful Feeling. To Have Survived.
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People Who Teach You Cram Old Ideas, Old Views, Old Ways, Into You. Like Covering Plants With Layer After Layer Of Old Earth; It's No Wonder The Poor Things So Rarely Come Up Fresh And Green.
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Our Present Educational Systems Are All Paramilitary. Their Aim Is To Produce Servants Or Soldiers Who Obey Without Question And Who Accepts Their Training As The Best Possible Training. Those Who Are Most Successful In The State Are Those Who Have The Most Interest In Prolonging The State As It Is; They Are Also Those Who Have The Most Say In The Educational System, And In Particular By Ensuring That The Educational Product They Want Is The Most Highly Rewarded.
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There Is No Plan. All Is Hazard. And The Only Thing That Will Preserve Us Is Ourselves.
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In Some Mysterious Way Woods Have Never Seemed To Me To Be Static Things. In Physical Terms, I Move Through Them; Yet In Metaphysical Ones, They Seem To Move Through Me.
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The Word Is The Most Imprecise Of Signs. Only A Science-obsessed Age Could Fail To Comprehend That This Is Its Great Virtue, Not Its Defect.
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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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One Of The Great Fallacies Of Our Time Is That The Nazis Rose To Power Because They Imposed Order On Chaos. Precisely The Opposite Is True
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The Privileges Of Knowledge Have To Be Bought At The Cost Of The Consolations Of Ignorance.
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Alive. Alive In The Way That Death Is Alive.
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There Is Only One Good Definition Of God: The Freedom That Allows Other Freedoms To Exist.
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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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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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One Of The Great Fallacies Of Our Time Is That The Nazis Rose To Power Because They Imposed Order On Chaos. Precisely The Opposite Is True - They Were Successful Because They Imposed Chaos On Order. They Tore Up The Commandments, They Denied The Super-ego, What You Will. They Said, "you May Persecute The Minority, You May Kill, You May Torture, You May Couple And Breed Without Love." They Offered Humanity All Its Great Temptations. Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted.
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Though I Like The Various Forms Of Football In The World, I Don't Think They Begin To Compare With These Two Great Anglo-saxon Ball Games For Sophisticated Elegance And Symbolism. 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. With Football We Are Back To The Monotonous Clashing Armor Of The Brontosaurus.
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Follow The Accident, Fear The Fixed Plan--that Is The Rule.
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And I Just Can't Live In This Present. I Would Go Mad If I Did.
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The Moon Hung Over The Planet Earth, A Dead Thing Over A Dying Thing.
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Ordinary
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Rooms
Empty
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Choices
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Hate
Jealous
Mean
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War
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Suicide
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Contradictory
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Men
Evil
Tragedy
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Routine
Nightmare
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Want
Paradox
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Self
Age
Adulthood
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Reality
Long
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Effort
Green
Cynicism
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Passion
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Prayer
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Leisure
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Wonderland
Being True
Felt
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Decent
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Poor
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Girl
Sex
Loneliness
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Hangover
Two
Kind
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Talking
Acting
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Psychological Health
Talking
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Silly
Intelligent
Whole Sight; Or All The Rest Is Desolation.
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Desolation
Whole
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Art
Portraits
Interest
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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Nice
Thinking
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They Looked Down On Her; And She Looked Up Through Them.
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Said
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Music
Art
Creative
All Novelists Should Live In Two Different Worlds: A Real One And An Unreal One.
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Two
Novelists
You Put Up With Your Voice And Speak With It Because You Haven't Any Choice. But It's What You Say That Counts.
Voice
Choices
Speak
You Come To The United States Not Knowing What To Expect. Then All Your Worst Prejudices Are Confirmed.
Knowing
United States
Prejudice
Piers Is Always Going On About How He Hated Stowe. As If That Solves Everything, As If To Hate Something Means It Can't Have Affected You.
Hate
Mean
Piers
Only One Same Reason Is Shared By All Of Us: We Wish To Create Worlds As Real As, But Other Than The World That Is. Or Was. This Is Why We Cannot Plan. We Know A World Is An Organism, Not A Machine. We Also Know That A Genuinely Created World Must Be Independent Of Its Creator; A Planned World (a World That Fully Reveals Its Planning) Is A Dead World. It Is Only When Our Characters And Events Begin To Disobey Us That They Begin To Live.
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Character
Independent
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Light
Skins
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Self
Ruins
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Forever
Has Beens
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Life
Philosophy
Acceptance
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May
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War
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Romance
Mystery
Trouble
It's No Good. I've Been Trying To Sleep For The Last Half-hour, And I Can't. Writing Here Is A Sort Of Drug. It's The Only Thing I Look Forward To. This Afternoon I Read What I Wrote... And It Seemed Vivid. I Know It Seems Vivid Because My Imagination Fills In All The Bits Another Person Wouldn't Understand. I Mean, It's Vanity. But It Seems A Sort Of Magic... And I Just Can't Live In This Present. I Would Go Mad If I Did
Writing
Mean
Sleep
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.
Thinking
Mercy
Insects
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.
Girl
Thinking
Singing
Greece Is Like A Mirror. It Makes You Suffer. Then You Learn.' To Live Alone?' To Live. With What You Are.
Mirrors
Suffering
Greece
The Best Wines Take The Longest To Mature.
Wine
Mature
Best Wine
In Essence The Renaissance Was Simply The Green End Of One Of Civilization's Hardest Winters.
Winter
Essence
Civilization
People Knew Less Of Each Other, Perhaps, But They Felt More Free Of Each Other, And So Were More Individual. The Entire World Was Not For Them Only A Push Or A Switch Away. Strangers Were Strange, And Sometimes With An Exciting, Beautiful Strangeness. It May Be Better For Humanity That We Should Communicate More And More.
Beautiful
Thinking
Space
It's Like The Day You Realize Dolls Are Dolls. I Pick Up My Old Self And I See It's Silly. A Toy I've Played With Too Often. It's A Little Sad, Like An Old Golliwog At The Bottom Of The Cupboard. Innocent And Used-up And Proud And Silly.
Silly
Self
Dolls
Which Are You Drinking? The Water Or The Wave?
Drinking
Water
Excellence
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.
Atheist
Intelligent
Coward
It's Despair At The Lack Of Feeling, Of Love, Of Reason In The World. It's Despair That Anyone Can Even Contemplate The Idea Of Dropping A Bomb Or Ordering That It Should Be Dropped. It's Despair That So Few Of Us Care. It's Despair That There's So Much Brutality And Callousness In The World. It's Despair That Perfectly Normal Young Men Can Be Made Vicious And Evil Because They've Won A Lot Of Money. And Then Do What You've Done To Me.
Life
Men
Perfectly Normal
Always We Try To Put The Wild In A Cage.
Trying
Cages
Environment
We Talked For Hours. He Talked And I Listened. It Was Like Wind And Sunlight. It Blew All The Cobwebs Away.
Wind
Cobwebs
Hours
Love Is The Mystery Between Two People, Not The Identity.
Love Is
Two
People
I Knew I Would Always Want To Go On Living With Myself, However Hollow I Became, However Diseased.
Goes On
Want
Diseased
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.
Passion
Men
Soul
Art Is A Statement Of One In The Face Of All; Not A Statement By One For The Use Of All.
Art
Use
Faces
An Aphorism Is A Generalization, Therefore Not Modern.
Modern
Aphorism
Generalization
The Bowed Head, The Buried Face. She Is Silent, She Will Never Speak, Never Forgive, Never Reach A Hand, Never Leave This Frozen Present Tense. All Waits, Suspended. Suspended The Autumn Trees, The Autumn Sky, Anonymous People. A Blackbird, Poor Fool, Sings Out Of Season From The Willows By The Lake. A Flight Of Pigeons Over The Houses; Fragments Of Freedom, Hazard, An Anagram Made Flesh. And Somewhere The Stinging Smell Of Burning Leaves.
Autumn
Smell
Lakes
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.
Writing
Garden
Creating
Liking Other People Is An Illusion We Have To Cherish In Ourselves If We Are To Live In Society.
People
Cherish
Illusion
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.
Writing
Dark
Civilization
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.
Art
Wall
Hate
The Pronoun Is One Of The Most Terrifying Masks Man Has Invented.
Men
Mask
Pronouns
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.
Hate
Love You
Forget Everything
Wolves Don't Hunt Singly, But Always In Pairs. The Lone Wolf Was A Myth.
Pairs
Lone Wolf
Myth
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.
Fiction
Path
Given
...all Cynicism Masks A Failure To Cope.
Cynicism
Mask
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.
Optimistic
Simple
Republic
Medieval Theologians Used To Dispute How The Angels In The Heaven Spent Their Time, When Not Balancing On Needle Points And Singing Anthems To The Lord. I Know. They Slump Glued To Their Clouds, Glasses At The Ready, As The Archangel Micheal (that Well-known Slasher) And Stonewalling St Peter Open Against The Devils Xi. It Could Not Be Heaven, Otherwise.
Angel
Clouds
Glasses
That Is The Great Distinction Between The Sexes. Men See Objects, Women See The Relationships Between Objects.
Sex
Men
Distinction
Another Reason I Think The Novel Will Survive Is That The Reader Has To Work In A Novel. In A Film, You Are Presented With Someone Else's Imagination Exactly Bodied Out. The Marvelous Thing About A Novel Is That Every Reader Will Imagine Even The Very Simplest Sentence Slightly Differently.
Thinking
Imagination
Empathy
That Is The Great Distinction Between The Sexes. Men See Objects, Women Seetherelationship Between Objects? It Is An Extra Dimension Of Feeling Which We Men Are Without And One That Makes War Abhorrent To All Real Women?and Absurd.
Sex
Real
War
The Profoundest Distances Are Never Geographical.
Distance
We All Write Poems; It Is Simply That Poets Are The Ones Who Write In Words.
Writing
Reading Poetry
Poetry
The Human Race Is Unimportant. It Is The Self That Must Not Be Betrayed.' 'i Suppose One Could Say That Hitler Didn't Betray His Self.' He Turned. 'you Are Right. He Did Not. But Millions Of Germans Did Betray Their Selves. That Was The Tragedy.'
Men
Race
Self
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