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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

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
People
Constricting
Characters
Based
Known
Character

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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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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
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Julian Barnes
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
Julian Barnes
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
Julian Barnes
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
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He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
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.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes
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The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
Julian Barnes
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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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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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Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
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?
Julian Barnes