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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
Englishmen
Form
Spirits
Would
Surely
World

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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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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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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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History is the lies of the victors.
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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.
Julian Barnes
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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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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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
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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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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
Julian Barnes
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
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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!
Julian Barnes
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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Julian Barnes
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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Julian Barnes