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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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
Pretending
Consists
Anymore
Wisdom
Discarding
Artifice
Partly
More quotes by Julian Barnes
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?
Julian Barnes
...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
Julian Barnes
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Julian Barnes
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Julian Barnes
Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes
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?
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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
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.
Julian Barnes
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
Julian Barnes
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
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]
Julian Barnes
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
Julian Barnes
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
Julian Barnes
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
