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
writing thinking fiction
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
couple tasks breakfast
A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.
half defeat life-is
The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
anxiety firsts usual
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
beautiful lying literature
[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.
uplifting art self-confidence
Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.
historical littles moments
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
heart mean able
There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.
wine blessing global-warming
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
depth difficulty god-knows
...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
grief wind weather
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.
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.
years littles made
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
thought-provoking youth pretentious
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?