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Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

Of course, there were other sorts of literature — theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical — but they were just dry wanks.
– Julian Barnes

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  1. Men and women find all sorts of ways to be together, all sorts of ways. Yours was high and dangerous. Most of us stay on the lower paths. – Josephine Hart
  2. Hard and dry, a chickpea is inedible.Hard and dry, a heart is unlovable.Presoak it in dance, music and art. – Khang Kijarro Nguyen
  3. Only I had dry eyes, a dry heart. – VC Andrews
  4. Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical. – Frederick Buechner
  5. She wasn’t being methodological. She was being autobiographical. – Stephen L Carter
  6. We see ourselves as self-sufficient, self-important, and self-sustaining. God sees us as dependent, self-centered, and self-deceived. – Billy Graham
  7. And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. – Julian Barnes
  8. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. – Julian Barnes
  9. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? – Julian Barnes
  10. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. – Julian Barnes
  11. Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance. – Julian Barnes
  12. Pride makes us long for a solution to things -“ a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. – Julian Barnes
  13. Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be. – Julian Barnes
  14. The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. – Julian Barnes
  15. The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else. – Julian Barnes
  16. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. – Julian Barnes
  17. History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us. – Julian Barnes
  18. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty. – Julian Barnes
  19. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a ????ing mess. – Julian Barnes
  20. Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex. – Julian Barnes
  21. you find yourself repeating, -˜They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. – Julian Barnes
  22. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? – Julian Barnes
  23. There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd. – Julian Barnes
  24. Throw off your grief,’ doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away. – Julian Barnes
  25. The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? – Julian Barnes
  26. 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
  27. …I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. – Julian Barnes
  28. But I don’t remember. I won’t remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. – Julian Barnes
  29. wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment. – Julian Barnes
  30. Opera cuts to the chase-”as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. – Julian Barnes
  31. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby. – Julian Barnes
  32. The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. – Julian Barnes
  33. But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put down life the way you put down a book. – Julian Barnes
  34. Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke. – Julian Barnes
  35. ..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. – Julian Barnes
  36. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen. – Julian Barnes
  37. I don’t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don’t have the power, alas. – Julian Barnes
  38. If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul. – Julian Barnes
  39. Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity. – Julian Barnes
  40. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. – Julian Barnes

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