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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

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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
Since
Professional
Moment
Anyway
Moments
Anxiety
Nothing
Recognize
Misread
Thing
Easily
Novelist
Going
Brave
Signs
Writer
Novelists
Full
Admit

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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
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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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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?
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[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
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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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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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History is the lies of the victors.
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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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.
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Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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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.
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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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!
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
Julian Barnes