Quotes of Julian Barnes - somelinesforyou

“ One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. ”

- 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

“ How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves. ”

- 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 sense of are other people's lives, never your own. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. ... Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. 'Tragic Death of "Promising" Young Man.' ... The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' ... The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? ”

- Julian Barnes

“ Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve? ”

- Julian Barnes

“ This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parentswere they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. ”

- Julian Barnes

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

- Julian Barnes

“ Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ 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 clearedged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly reforming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ Remember the botched brothelvisit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. ”

- Julian Barnes

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

- 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 belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ 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

“ 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

“ 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

“ Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong? ”

- 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

“ History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated. ”

- Julian Barnes

“ And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. ”

- Julian Barnes
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