Quote

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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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
Every
Sky
Raining
Would
Animals
Hint
Time
Rain
Unicorn
Instead
Hints
Animal
Restore
Bigs
Rainbow
Didn
Happier
Place
Stopped
Magnanimity

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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
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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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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
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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.
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
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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?
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Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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