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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
Book
Writing
Life
Helps
Writer
Books
Write
Helping
Best
More quotes by Julian Barnes
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
Julian Barnes
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.
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
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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
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
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
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
Julian Barnes
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
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
Julian Barnes
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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
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.
Julian Barnes
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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
