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What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
Julian Barnes
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Julian Barnes
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 19
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
Writer
Leicester
England
J. Barnes
J Barnes
Edward Pygge
Julian Patrick Barnes
Self
Curiosity
Always
Favorite
Love
Simply
Worst
Preferring
Interest
Hurdle
Makes
Perversion
Doe
Tire
Best
Wanting
More quotes by Julian Barnes
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
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Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Julian Barnes
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
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The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.
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We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
Julian Barnes
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
Julian Barnes
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
