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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.

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
Wells
Fail
Well
Failing
Enough
Depends
Writing
Realize
Thing
Seem
Things
Realizing
Time
Literature
Seems
Several

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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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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.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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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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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
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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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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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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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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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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.
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History is the lies of the victors.
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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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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
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