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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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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
Enough
Supported
Giving
Certainty
Time
Decisions
Seem
Decision
Seems
Wobbly
Give
Certainties
Best
Whimsical

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
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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.
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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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Julian Barnes
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Julian Barnes
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
Julian Barnes
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
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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He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
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Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
Julian Barnes
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes
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(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes