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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

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
Arguing
Clever
Anything
Argue

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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
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Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?
Julian Barnes
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
Julian Barnes
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we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
Julian Barnes
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
Julian Barnes
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Julian Barnes
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We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
Julian Barnes
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
Julian Barnes
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Julian Barnes
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
Julian Barnes
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Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
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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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
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Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
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