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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!

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
Thinking
Entirely
Rational
Beyond
Goes
Fear
Death
Fearing
Seems
Morbid
Think
Whereas

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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
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Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
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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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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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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
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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.
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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And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61]
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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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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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Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]
Julian Barnes
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
Julian Barnes