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

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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
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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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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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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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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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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
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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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I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
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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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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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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
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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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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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