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Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side?
Julian Barnes
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Opera cuts to the chase—as death does... [it is] an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
Julian Barnes
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Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d'etre of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath.
Julian Barnes
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Irony — The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.
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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.
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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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Whores — Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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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.
Julian Barnes
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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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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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I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (Out of the question,' Toni assured me, they're so badly written they must be authentic').
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Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
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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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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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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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.
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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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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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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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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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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
Julian Barnes on Wikipedia
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