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
writing dark years
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?
writing fiction world
When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world
writing literature realizing
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.
grief fall writing
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
selfish good-love writing
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.
book writing doe
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?
writing ideas people
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.
writing thinking fiction
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
writing people missing
Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.
book writing helping
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
writing thinking ideas
I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.
historical luxurious oyster sides sixties throat touching
The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiac they slipped down the historical throat without touching the sides
happiness happy secret
The secret of happiness is to be happy already
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.