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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
Eye
Extreme
Find
Extremes
Wells
Condition
Well
Suffer
Watering
Love
Conditions
Delusions
People
Known
Conceptual
Suffering
Thrilling
Common
Delusion
More quotes by Julian Barnes
WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian Barnes
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
Julian Barnes
We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
Julian Barnes
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Julian Barnes
Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
Julian Barnes
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Julian Barnes
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
Julian Barnes
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Julian Barnes
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
Julian Barnes
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
Julian Barnes
