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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
Britain
Writer
Influence
Rather
Suspiciously
Sometimes
Dubious
Regarded
French

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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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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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I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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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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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
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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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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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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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We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
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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.
Julian Barnes