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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
Reward
Merit
Rewards
Begin
Understand
Business
Life

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
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Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
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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.
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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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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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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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.
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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History is the lies of the victors.
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It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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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.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
Julian Barnes