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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

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
Majority
Skills
Reading
Art
Minority
Minorities
Skill

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Julian Barnes
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Julian Barnes
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(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
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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
Julian Barnes
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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?
Julian Barnes
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I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
Julian Barnes
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
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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The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
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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
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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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Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
Julian Barnes
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Julian Barnes
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
Julian Barnes
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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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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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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.
Julian Barnes