707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

  • Author Julian Barnes
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    My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

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  • Author Julian Barnes
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    He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

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  • Author Julian Barnes
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    When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

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  • Author Julian Barnes
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    The woman (assuming the artist is male) is always on a loser: if she brings money into a marriage, this is imprisoning; if she doesn’t, she brings anxiety. If she makes him happy, she dulls his artistic edge; if she doesn’t, she acts as an additional distraction from his art. And then there is sex (which a lot of this is often about). Even if prevailing social hypocrisies apply, and the man is allowed to roam – but appearances are kept up – what happens if he wants to write about it?

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  • Author Julian Barnes
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    We believe too little, and aesthetically know too much; so we re-create, we find new categories of pleasure in the work.

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  • Author Julian Barnes
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    The title of The Raft of the Medusa, incidentally, is not The Raft of the Medusa. The painting was listed in the Salon catalogue as Scène de naufrage – Scene of Shipwreck. A cautious political move? Perhaps. But it’s equally a useful instruction to the spectator: this is a painting, not an opinion.“Keeping an Eye Open”.

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