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
bits convinced gratifying people truer
But I think you could make it truer by making it up. In a way when people say it could have been non-fiction, that is gratifying because I've convinced them and they can't tell the bits I've made up from the bits I didn't make up.
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The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiac they slipped down the historical throat without touching the sides
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The secret of happiness is to be happy already
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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.
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Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it - and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever.
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You grew old first not in your own eyes,but in other people's eyes;slowly,you agreed with their opinion of you.
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I think he had a quite sort of ambiguous relationship to Holmes. It made him rich, it made him famous, but as often the case with these things, a writer can turn against his or her most successful creation; hence, he killed him off (in 'The Adventure of the Final Problem') and brought him back by popular request. And, of course, people did sort of confuse them and assume if he could invent these complicated mysteries, then he could also solve them.
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I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces,
boy holmes moment sherlock
I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle,
disappointment bridges piers
A pier is a disappointed bridge.
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It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
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It's the great drama, the great unknowable of most of our lives, ... We don't all paddle up the Amazon in a canoe and get shot at, but we do the equivalent of that (in our relationships).
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That form is very freeing, ... It's a great relief for the novelist not to have to be there in the way a third-person narrator implies. If you get rid of all that -- that judging entity -- you just leave the character alone with the reader.
asked books happened people talking
Talking It Over' is the only one of my books people asked me what happened next, ... And they disagreed about what happened when the book concluded.