Sunday May 25, 2008
guardian.co.uk
Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes. Photograph: Alberto Estevez/EPA
What’s on my bedside table is often very mixed and it usually has quite a lot of magazines because I like to do my main reading during the day. There will usually be some poetry, including a collection of Thomas Hardy at the moment. And it will [...]

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I heard Puff the Magic Dragon for the first time when I was 20. It was late at night, on a beach, by Lake Michigan. There was a fire in the pit that I had helped to dig. We were roasting marshmallows and getting drunk on beer and sugary vodka drinks that [...]

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Time is desperately short. I don’t remember if I’ve always believed this, or if it is a recent development, but the thought sits on my shoulder, like some perverted demon. It seeks proof in everything, wants to nail things down, establish things, prove things. It wants to feel that everything is solid [...]

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“Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.”
I think this would make a fantastic prologue to something. It sounds epic. It sounds like it should be written on a gate, above an elvish entrance-way, or carved into a stone in the middle of a plane in the middle [...]

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The play was not terrible — a solidly crafted story of three translators with different fates; a little trapped in its own theatricality, and perhaps struggling under the huge political burden of its subject, but a solid, small show — what I found truly infuriating was the audience. The small space was filled mostly [...]

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‘It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.’ — Lorrie Moore
On Saturdays I come unhinged. All week I spend with other people, in buildings and institutions, within boundaries, negotiating paths, being polite, being irreverent, being something. [...]

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I finally dragged myself to see this show, which I was dreading seeing, because I feared that it would be another play dwelling on the empty brutality of the American ilk: family cruelty, the awful things we do to each other, American Beauty, which I never saw. I sometimes wonder if I can survive [...]

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By the time she turned 65 she had finished with words. The last vowels of the birthday song floated through the room and she knew that that was it. Alone in her house — rooms empty and silent like yawns — she would let silent thoughts wander, her eyes filling in the space [...]

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I am one of the soundest sleepers I know. I fall asleep spontaneously — sometimes before I even make it into bed — and I stay asleep without effort. I will often wake up in the exact same position in which I fell asleep, as though time had not actually passed. When [...]

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