Julian Barnes Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Writing, Helping

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

  Julian Barnes

  Strong, Memories, Confused

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  6 Copy quote

• Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

  Julian Barnes

  Thought Provoking, Youth, Pretentious

  4 Copy quote

• May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

  Julian Barnes

  Baby, Ordinary, May

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.144, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.

  Julian Barnes

  Rain, Animal, Sky

  Julian Barnes (2010). “A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters”, p.28, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.

  Julian Barnes

  Pretending, Used

  Julian Barnes (2010). “Talking It Over”, p.17, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

  Julian Barnes

  Travel, Memories, Ideas

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

  4 Copy quote

• I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

  Julian Barnes

  Self, Survival, Instinct

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.42, Random House

  7 Copy quote

• We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

  Julian Barnes

  Progress, Pace, Pieces

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.60, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

  Julian Barnes

  Memories, Lying, Pulse

  "The Sense of an Ending". Book by Julian Barnes (Page 122), www.huffingtonpost.com. 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

  Julian Barnes

  Might, Enjoy, Novel

  Julian Barnes (2012). “Through the Window: Seventeen Essays (and one short story)”, p.11, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

  Julian Barnes

  Selfish, Good Love, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

  Julian Barnes

  Echoes, Soul, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Julian Barnes

  Wife, Mistress, Paper

  7 Copy quote

• The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

  Julian Barnes

  Land, Breakfast, Embarrassment

  Flaubert's Parrot (1984) ch. 7

  16 Copy quote

• When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

  Julian Barnes

  Escaping, Smell, Cooking

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

  4 Copy quote

• If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

  Julian Barnes

  Reader, Uncomplicated, Ifs

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

  4 Copy quote

• Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

  Julian Barnes

  Sex, Opposites, Tests

  Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.78, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

  Julian Barnes

  Pretending, Artifice

  4 Copy quote

• And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

  Julian Barnes

  Pain, Pleasure, Teach

  4 Copy quote

• People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

  Julian Barnes

  Eye, People, Suffering

  4 Copy quote

• Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.

  Julian Barnes

  Religious, Numbers, Despair

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

  4 Copy quote

• Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

  Julian Barnes

  Dream, Memories, Childhood

  Julian Barnes (1998). “England, England”, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

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