Quotes by Barry Unsworth

About Barry Unsworth:

Barry Unsworth was a English writer known for his historical fiction. He published 17 novels, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .

Barry Unsworth

Money is sacred as everyone knows... So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to d...

Barry Unsworth

It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you try to make it into four shillin' . . . there is no end to it.

Barry Unsworth

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.

Barry Unsworth

Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.

Barry Unsworth

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside ...

Barry Unsworth

The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.

Barry Unsworth

Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.

Barry Unsworth

Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

Barry Unsworth

The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge - much older than the desire for truth - to command attention, dominate one's fellows.

Barry Unsworth

I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jo...

Barry Unsworth

In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes.

Barry Unsworth

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

Barry Unsworth

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant se...

Barry Unsworth

As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind o...

Barry Unsworth

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

Barry Unsworth

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Barry Unsworth

But whatever the ramifications, whatever turns the path takes, the beginning is always there, in a particular moment, a particular point of access.

Barry Unsworth

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

Barry Unsworth

I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.

Barry Unsworth

Author Bio

  • NameBarry Unsworth
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist
  • BornAugust 18, 1930
  • DiedJune 4, 2012
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksSacred Hunger