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Julian Barnes quotes - page 3
Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.
Julian Barnes
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
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
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
Julian Barnes
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
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
Julian Barnes
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?
Julian Barnes
If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
Julian Barnes
I've always thought you are what you are and you shouldn't pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you're pretending to be.
Julian Barnes
If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.
Julian Barnes
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
Julian Barnes
.. books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
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.
Julian Barnes
I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (`Out of the question,' Toni assured me, `they're so badly written they must be authentic').
Julian Barnes
You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vague Deutscher all hot for Truthspiel.
Julian Barnes
This is I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason.
Julian Barnes
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
Julian Barnes
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
Julian Barnes
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