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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

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
Guessing
Usual
Seemed
Game
Games
Even

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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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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I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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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.
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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
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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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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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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
Julian Barnes
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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Julian Barnes