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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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
Understand
Business
Life
Reward
Merit
Rewards
Begin
More quotes by Julian Barnes
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Julian Barnes
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
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
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
Julian Barnes
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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
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.
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
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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
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
You can put it another way, of course you always can.
Julian Barnes
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
