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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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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
First
Swirls
Published
Justified
Usual
Anxiety
Novel
Hope
Swirl
Firsts
Unjustified

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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
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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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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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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.
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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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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.
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Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
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What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
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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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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.
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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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He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
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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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