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
anxiety firsts usual
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
world glances courses
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
thought-provoking youth pretentious
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
should happened happens
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
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.
focus fiction may
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
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.
way courses another-way
You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
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.
responsibility unrest accumulation
There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.
order needs facts
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.
subtraction multiplication
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
disappointment interesting achievement
And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand. [pp.60-61]