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

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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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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
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All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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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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The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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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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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
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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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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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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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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
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How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal how dark the sky how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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