Julian Barnes Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

  Julian Barnes

  Games, Usual, Guessing

  Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.38, Random House

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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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• What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

  Julian Barnes

  Memories

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• 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?

  Julian Barnes

  Important, Lines, Speak

  "The road not taken" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. October 8, 2005.

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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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• But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

  Julian Barnes

  Rewards, Merit

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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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• ...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

  Julian Barnes

  Depth, Difficulty, God Knows

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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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• 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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• And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you’d do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It’s just as eloquent as speech.

  Julian Barnes

  Love, Distance, Moving

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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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• But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

  Julian Barnes

  Strong, Memories, Powerful

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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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• 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.

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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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• Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

  Julian Barnes

  Eye, Elderly, World

  Julian Barnes (2010). “England, England”, p.258, Random House

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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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