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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
Language
Death
Look
Gestures
Looks
Precise
Must
Clearly
Love
Save
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More quotes by Julian Barnes

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The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.
Julian Barnes
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
Julian Barnes
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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
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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.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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His air of failure had nothing desperate about it rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.
Julian Barnes
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History is the lies of the victors.
Julian Barnes
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
Julian Barnes
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The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
Julian Barnes
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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.
Julian Barnes
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
Julian Barnes