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

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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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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.
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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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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
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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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Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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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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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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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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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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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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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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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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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.
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
Julian Barnes