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People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

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
Common
Delusion
Eye
Extreme
Find
Extremes
Wells
Condition
Well
Suffer
Watering
Love
Conditions
Delusions
People
Known
Conceptual
Suffering
Thrilling

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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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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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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
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I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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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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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]
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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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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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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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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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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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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All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
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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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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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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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