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
way courses another-way
You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
book mind way
The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
hate way serious
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
moving character way
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
safe way mature
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
mind way months
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 same certainty again.
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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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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.
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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.
agreed eyes grew opinion
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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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).
counts defeat easily frailty full life quite work
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.