Julian Barnes Quotes - Page 8

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• He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

  Julian Barnes

  Grief, Clouds, Wind

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• If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

  Julian Barnes

  Clever, Arguing, Ifs

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• Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.

  Julian Barnes

  Writing, People, Missing

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• Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Writing, Doe

  Flaubert's Parrot ch. 1 (1984)

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• [Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

  Julian Barnes

  Hate, Stupid, Moving

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• Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.

  Julian Barnes

  Brave, Anxiety, Novelists

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.

  Julian Barnes

  Couple, Tasks, Breakfast

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• That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

  Julian Barnes

  Order, Needs, Facts

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• Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

  Julian Barnes

  Moving, Character, Way

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• I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

  Julian Barnes

  Suicide, Light, Opposites

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• Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

  Julian Barnes

  Example, Certainty, Witness

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• Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

  Julian Barnes

  Giving, Feelings, Age

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• I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

  Julian Barnes

  Hate, Way, Serious

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.33, Random House

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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.

  Julian Barnes

  Writing, Literature, Realizing

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

  Julian Barnes

  Memories, Identity, Done

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• It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

  Julian Barnes

  People, Littles, Easy

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

  Julian Barnes

  Home, Long, Broken

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• WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

  Julian Barnes

  Genius, Syphilis, Century

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• The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

  Julian Barnes

  Writing, Dark, Years

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• You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.

  Julian Barnes

  Real, Philosophical, Past

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

  Julian Barnes

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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