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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

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
Writers
Friendship
Dead
Wonderful
Form
Live
Companionship

More quotes by 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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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Julian Barnes
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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
Julian Barnes
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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
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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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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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
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
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Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
Julian Barnes
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
Julian Barnes
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What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
Julian Barnes
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
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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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The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
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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
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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