"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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Quote collection
Julian Barnes quotes (page 5 of 10)
196 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed."
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"When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world"
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"Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction."
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"Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love."
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"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."
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"Every love story is a potential grief story."
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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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"You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible."
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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."
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"Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter."
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"What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible."
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"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
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"To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself."
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"I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it"
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"Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting."
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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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"But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time."
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"The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable."
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"You can put it another way, of course; you always can."
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