Julian Barnes Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Grief, Stories

• Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

  Julian Barnes

  Beautiful, Art, Writing

  Julian Barnes (1985). “Flaubert's parrot”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

• 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.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Reading, Skills

  "Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

• He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Mean, Insulted Him

  "Homage To Hemingway" by Julian Barnes, www.newyorker.com. July 4, 2011.

• Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Ambition, Dark

  Julian Barnes (2010). “A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters”, p.137, Random House

• Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Reading, Skills

  "Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

• Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

  Julian Barnes

  Uplifting, Art, Self Confidence

• 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.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Order, Different

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.65, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Self, Cities

  "A vineyard in Montmartre: just one of the hidden pleasures of Paris" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2011.

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