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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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
Books
Write
Helping
Best
Book
Writing
Life
Helps
Writer
More quotes by Julian Barnes
Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes
History is the lies of the victors.
Julian Barnes
we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
Julian Barnes
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.
Julian Barnes
(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.
Julian Barnes
You can put it another way, of course you always can.
Julian Barnes
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
Julian Barnes
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Julian Barnes
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Julian Barnes
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
Julian Barnes
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Julian Barnes
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
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.
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
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Julian Barnes
