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
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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
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Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle,
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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,
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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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In soccer, the form of the encoded adjective is well-developed.
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I just read the new novel by Jay McInerney, who is a friend of mine. And I did so with great apprehension, because it takes place around the time of those attacks. But I thought he handled it beautifully, since he comes at it from a bit of a side angle.