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
wife mistress paper
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.
writing fiction world
When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world
depression spring levels
The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.
artist years paris
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
psychics giving afar
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
selfish good-love writing
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.
lazy reader
There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.
photography love-is magic
Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.
grief levels-of-life stories
Every love story is a potential grief story.
memories
What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?
children adults negative
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
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.
memories lying next
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.