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
chief force interested london police racial resistance side trying white
I was also interested in the racial side of it. Even today, the Chief of the London Metropolitan Police is trying to make the force more representative of London and there's a lot of resistance from the predominantly white force.
travel memories ideas
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
grief mean alive
This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.
views two together
You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.
stupid hate moving
[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
discovery progress world
Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
art ambition dark
Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.
pain taken drunk
Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.
way courses another-way
You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
games usual guessing
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
too-much bother wanted
I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
children adults negative
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
ambition reality self
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.
powerful responsibility sole
Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary