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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

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
Writer
Influence
Rather
Sometimes
Suspiciously
Dubious
Regarded
French
Britain

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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Julian Barnes
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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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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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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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
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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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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Julian Barnes
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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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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Julian Barnes