Quote

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
Always
Favorite
Love
Simply
Worst
Preferring
Interest
Hurdle
Makes
Perversion
Doe
Tire
Best
Wanting
Self
Curiosity

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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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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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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
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There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
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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.
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The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
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