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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

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
Moving
Character
Way
Time
Munro
Alice
Characters
Writer
Move

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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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.
Julian Barnes
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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
Julian Barnes
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
Julian Barnes
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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?
Julian Barnes
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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?
Julian Barnes
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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?
Julian Barnes
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes
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Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
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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?
Julian Barnes
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
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If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
Julian Barnes
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
Julian Barnes
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
Julian Barnes
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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
Julian Barnes
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian Barnes