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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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
Courses
Course
Another
Way
Always
More quotes by Julian Barnes
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
Julian Barnes
[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
Julian Barnes
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.
Julian Barnes
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
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Julian Barnes
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.
Julian Barnes
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
Julian Barnes
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
Julian Barnes
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Julian Barnes
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
Julian Barnes
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
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Julian Barnes
And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61]
Julian Barnes
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
Julian Barnes
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
Julian Barnes
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
