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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

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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
Life
Laughing
Terrible
Adolescent
Goes
Boredom
Waiting
Relief
Words
Generation
Remember
Begin
Back
Took
Years
Generations

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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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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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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
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Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
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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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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?
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
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People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
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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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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
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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.
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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.
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
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