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All Quotes by author - Julian Barnes
" All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things. "
Lie
Night
You
" As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers. "
You
Wife
Front
" Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't. "
She
Life
Say
" 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? "
Important
Us
The Most Important
" Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists. "
Destroy
Grief
Patterns
" I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death! "
Fear
Beyond
Death
" 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. "
Paris
Us
Why
" I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it. "
Serious
Hate
English
" I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. "
Self-Preservation
Instinct
Survival
" I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books. "
Democrat
Complete
Who
" I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people. "
Write
About
People
" In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety. "
Anxiety
First
Hope
" In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art. "
Nature
Art
Society
" In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. "
Writer
Sometimes
Rather
" 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. "
Me
Paris
Artist
" 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. "
Planning
Falling
Grief
" Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. "
Us
Remember
Negative
" Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches. "
Time
Book
Promotion
" 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. "
Power
Love
Most
" Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book. "
Book
Perfect
Reading
" Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. "
Communion
Art
Skill
" The land of embarrassment and breakfast. "
Breakfast
Land
Embarrassment
" There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were. "
Bad
Readers
Were
" The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable. "
Unpredictable
Book
Changes
" To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock. "
Psychic
Objective
Us
" Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting. "
Known
Few
Characters
" Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. "
Tell
Journalism
Honest
" What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible. "
Possible
Greater
Away
" When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. "
Deeper
Escape
Great
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