Julian Barnes
Full Name: Julian Patrick Barnes
AKA: Dan Kavanagh and Edward Pygge
Birthdate: January 19, 1946
Birthplace: Leicester, England, United Kingdom
Occupation: Author
Profile: Best known for
Flaubert's Parrot.
Website: http://www.julianbarnes.com/
Number of Quotes: 47
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savor it.
The Noise of Time (2016).
As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.
Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.
Flaubert’s Parrot (1984).
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder.
Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
The Sense of an Ending (2011).
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly
cuts? [...] The longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account.
The Sense of an Ending (2011).
I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that
goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.
Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008).
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the
overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And
so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but
individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Talking It Over (1991).
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.
Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at
various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative
discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact,
complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Letters from London (1995).
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
The more you learn, the less you fear. Learn
not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.
The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
We live in a time of great precarity—except that the precarity is not equally shared.
The Noise of Time (2016).
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.
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
What is art but a way of seeing?
What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
What we want is not always the same as what is good for us.
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the
end of any likelihood of change in that life. […] What else have I done wrong?
The Sense of an Ending (2011).
You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.
Last on Earth
