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Irony — The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.
Julian Barnes
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I only said the English weren't famous for sex, that's all. Like the Boat Race, in out, in out, in out, then everyone collapsed over their oars.
Julian Barnes
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Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?
Julian Barnes
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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Julian Barnes
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Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.
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You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.
Julian Barnes
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
Julian Barnes
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But that's one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Julian Barnes
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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Julian Barnes
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
Julian Barnes
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Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.
Julian Barnes
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In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Julian Barnes
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Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Julian Barnes
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Pride makes us long for a solution to things — a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
Julian Barnes
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When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
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You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...
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He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind—or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean—except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.
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When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again.
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It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
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You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vague Deutscher all hot for Truthspiel.
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A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Julian Barnes
Born:
January 19, 1946
(age 78)
Bio:
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending, and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George.
Known for:
The Sense of an Ending (2011)
Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
Arthur & George (2005)
The Noise of Time (2016)
Levels of Life (2013)
Most used words:
life
time
love
young
thought
sense
memory
lives
women
writer
books
understand
art
people
story
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