Quotes by Julian Barnes

About Julian Barnes:

Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
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

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another

Julian Barnes

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

Julian Barnes

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Julian Barnes

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering it...

Julian Barnes

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download wi...

Julian Barnes

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

Julian Barnes

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

Julian Barnes

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the ...

Julian Barnes

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvement...

Julian Barnes

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like me...

Julian Barnes

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

Julian Barnes

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Julian Barnes

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Julian Barnes

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sen...

Julian Barnes

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

Julian Barnes

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Julian Barnes

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.

Julian Barnes

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Julian Barnes

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to ...

Julian Barnes

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Julian Barnes

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Julian Barnes

Author Bio

  • NameJulian Barnes
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • AliasesBarnes, Julian; J. Barnes; J Barnes
  • BornJanuary 19, 1946
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Translator; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksThe Sense Of An Ending
  • AwardsAustrian State Prize For European Literature; Man Booker Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize