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"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
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"A book is as private and consensual as sex."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."
"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
"I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
"WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."
"I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."
"Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be."
"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."
"I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into."
"When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself."
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