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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.
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
Must
Hold
Men
Ought
Wants
Desire
Tell
Cannot
Complicated
Become
Fast
Find
Duty
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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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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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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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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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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If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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