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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.

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
Write
Myth
Overall
Writing
Depth
Flat
Mind
Grief
Flats
Terms
Metaphor
Coming
Height
Term
Rising
Point
Falling
Thereof
Fall
Planning
Initially

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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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we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
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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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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
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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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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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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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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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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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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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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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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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