Quote

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

Julian Barnes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Julian Barnes
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 19
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
Writer
Leicester
England
J. Barnes
J Barnes
Edward Pygge
Julian Patrick Barnes
Life
Guessing
Usual
Seemed
Game
Games
Even

More quotes by Julian Barnes

Image
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Julian Barnes
Image
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
Julian Barnes
Image
The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
Image
There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
Julian Barnes
Image
But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Julian Barnes
Image
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
Julian Barnes
Image
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
Julian Barnes
Image
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Julian Barnes
Image
Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
Julian Barnes
Image
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Julian Barnes
Image
I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
Julian Barnes
Image
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.
Julian Barnes
Image
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
Image
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
Julian Barnes
Image
Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes
Image
What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
Julian Barnes
Image
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Julian Barnes
Image
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
Image
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
Julian Barnes
Image
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
Julian Barnes