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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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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
Process
Facts
Assemblage
Tell
Ordered
Beautiful
Producing
Truth
Grand
Wells
Lies
Well
Literature
Lying

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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
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Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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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?
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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.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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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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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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Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
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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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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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His air of failure had nothing desperate about it rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
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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.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
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