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In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

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
Order
Oppressive
Nature
Valued
Truth
Highly
Sometimes
Telling
Different
Elements
Work
Literature
Society
Art

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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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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
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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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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
Julian Barnes
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Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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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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Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
Julian Barnes