Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes
Julian Patrick Barnesis an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending, and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 January 1946
psychics giving afar
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
grief levels-of-life stories
Every love story is a potential grief story.
dubious influence sometimes
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
pretending used
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.
pretending artifice
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
rewards merit
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
echoes soul mind
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?
grief patterns firsts
Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
brave anxiety novelists
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.
thought-provoking youth pretentious
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
smell escaping cooking
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.
gestures looks language
we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
historian happened
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
ambition reality self
In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.