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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

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
Genius
Contraction
Century
Syphilis
Without
Contractions
Whores
Nineteenth
Claim
Claims
Necessary

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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
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Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
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[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
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Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
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Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
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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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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
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