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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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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
Night
Things
Think
Thinking
Exaggerated
Awake
Middle
Lying

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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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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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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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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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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.
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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?
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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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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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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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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
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We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
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