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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

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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
Must
Precise
Love
Clearly
Save
Learn
Language
Death
Look
Looks
Gestures

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.
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How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal how dark the sky how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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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.
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Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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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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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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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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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.
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Julian Barnes