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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?

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
Age
Rewards
Purpose
Warm
Business
Serve
Feelings
Towards
Mellow
Ends
Expect
Evolutionary
Give
Comfortable
Nostalgia
Giving
Possible
Reward
Life
Though
Merit

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.
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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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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Julian Barnes
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
Julian Barnes
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How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal how dark the sky how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
Julian Barnes
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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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The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.
Julian Barnes
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
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Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
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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?
Julian Barnes
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
Julian Barnes
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Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
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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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
Julian Barnes
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If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
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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He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Julian Barnes
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We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
Julian Barnes