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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?

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
Passed
Proper
Indeed
Spirit
Queue
Next
Queues
Form
Englishmen
Would
Spirits
World
Surely

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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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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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.
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(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
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History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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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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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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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.
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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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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
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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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He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
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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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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes