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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 greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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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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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?
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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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You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.
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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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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
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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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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
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