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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.

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
Survivor
Assured
Defeated
Glibly
Neither
Victors
Lies
Survivors
Memories
Victorious
Lying
Hunt
History
Hunts

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian Barnes
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
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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
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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
Julian Barnes
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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
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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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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.
Julian Barnes
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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?
Julian Barnes
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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Julian Barnes
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I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
Julian Barnes
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We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
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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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes