Julian Barnes Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

Julian Barnes

Mean, Government, Giving

7 Copy quote
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]

Julian Barnes

Disappointment, Interesting, Achievement

Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.56, Random House

4 Copy quote
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

Julian Barnes

Dubious, Sometimes, Influence

Julian Barnes, Vanessa Guignery, Ryan Roberts (2009). “Conversations with Julian Barnes”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

4 Copy quote
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

Julian Barnes

Past, Faults, Details

Julian Barnes (2010). “Talking It Over”, p.15, Random House

4 Copy quote
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.

Julian Barnes

Depression, Spring, Levels

8 Copy quote
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

Julian Barnes

Psychics, Giving, Looks

"Julian Barnes: The sense of another ending". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. March 30, 2013.

4 Copy quote
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

Julian Barnes

Stars, Asking Why, Paris

"A vineyard in Montmartre: just one of the hidden pleasures of Paris" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2011.

4 Copy quote
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

Julian Barnes

Anxiety, Usual, Firsts

4 Copy quote
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.

Julian Barnes

Fashion, Cutting, Air

Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

4 Copy quote
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

Julian Barnes

Book, Grind, Promotion

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

4 Copy quote
There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.

Julian Barnes

Lazy, Reader

"Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

4 Copy quote
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

Julian Barnes

Book, Literature, Hawthorne

"Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

4 Copy quote
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

Julian Barnes

Subtraction, Multiplication

Julian Barnes (2011). “The Sense of an Ending”, p.88, Random House

6 Copy quote
I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]

Julian Barnes

Years, Laughing, Boredom

6 Copy quote
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.

Julian Barnes

Focus, Fiction, May

Julian Barnes (2008). “Nothing To Be Frightened Of”, p.157, Random House

6 Copy quote
There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.

Julian Barnes

Responsibility, Unrest, Accumulation

6 Copy quote
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.

Julian Barnes

Ambition, Reality, Self

10 Copy quote
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

Julian Barnes

Home, Long, Broken

5 Copy quote
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.

Julian Barnes

Couple, Tasks, Breakfast

4 Copy quote
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.

Julian Barnes

Half, Life Is, Defeat

6 Copy quote
I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

Julian Barnes

Book, Democrat, Term

4 Copy quote
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Julian Barnes

Writing, Ideas, People

4 Copy quote
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Julian Barnes

Moving, Character, Way

4 Copy quote
The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

Julian Barnes

Writing, Dark, Years

4 Copy quote
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

Julian Barnes

Book, Reading, Discovery

"Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

4 Copy quote

Latest quotes from interviews

"Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable."

- Julian Barnes,

www.pbs.org, added Nov 17, 2015

More (4)