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"Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry."
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"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."
"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
"The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness."
"Let music ignite your vivid inner colors and bring you harmony inside and out."
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."
"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
"You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess."
"The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable."
"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."
"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves."
"There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd."
"Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time."
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