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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
Rather
Sometimes
Suspiciously
Dubious
Regarded
French
Britain
Writer
Influence

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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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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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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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History is the lies of the victors.
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Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
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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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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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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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How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal how dark the sky how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
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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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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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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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And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61]
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Julian Barnes
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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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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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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