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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
Minorities
Skill
Majority
Skills
Reading
Art
Minority
More quotes by Julian Barnes
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
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.
Julian Barnes
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
Julian Barnes
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
Julian Barnes
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
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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
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
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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
To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
Julian Barnes
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Julian Barnes
