Julian Barnes Quotes About Literature
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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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Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
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This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
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In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
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