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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.

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
Love
Various
Civilisation
Certainly
Boast
Cities
Centre
Least
Argue
Times
European
Art
Arguing
Power
Paris
Self
Arts
Boastful

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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
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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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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.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.
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If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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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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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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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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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
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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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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Julian Barnes
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When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
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we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
Julian Barnes