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"Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry."
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"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all."

"We often forget to draw a new picture because we are so busy criticizing other paintings."

"A beautiful poem is nothing but a mirror of philosophy through which we can see life's pure beauty."

"Poets create a beautiful blue sky where you can fly with wings of imagination and find yourself again and again."

"The object of art is to enhance the beauty, imaginations and joy of life."

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture."

"Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."

"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."

"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."

"Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure."

"He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself."

"A pier is a disappointed bridge, yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel."

"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."

"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history."
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