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

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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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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
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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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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
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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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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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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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Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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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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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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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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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes