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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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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
Purpose
Proving
Sometimes
Reconcile
Long
Cracked
Think
Wearing
Thinking
However
Life
Prove
Loss
Takes
Eventual

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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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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.
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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
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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]
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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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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Julian Barnes
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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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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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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All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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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.
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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 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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