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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

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
Speed
Advantage
Fiction
Time

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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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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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?
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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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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
Julian Barnes
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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
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The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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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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.
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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.
Julian Barnes
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The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
Julian Barnes
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Julian Barnes