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Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
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
Much
Would
People
Items
Steal
Stealing
Opinion
Poor
Didn
More quotes by Julian Barnes
Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Julian Barnes
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
I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
Julian Barnes
I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
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
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
Julian Barnes
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Julian Barnes
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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
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.
Julian Barnes
There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
Julian Barnes
You can put it another way, of course you always can.
Julian Barnes
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
