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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

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
Else
Pretentious
Youth
Courses
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More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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History is the lies of the victors.
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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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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
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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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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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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
Julian Barnes
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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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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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