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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
Save
Learn
Language
Death
Look
Looks
Gestures
Must
Precise
Love
Clearly

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
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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.
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Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
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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
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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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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
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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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
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes
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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
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
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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
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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
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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
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
Julian Barnes
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Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
Julian Barnes
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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