Quote

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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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
Art
Gentle
Give
English
Self
Confidence
Uplift
Giving
Least
Jacket
Something
Imagine
Jackets
Life
Word
Uplifting
Forget
Designed
Sense
French

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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
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I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.
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I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
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You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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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.
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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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