Quote

The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.

Julian Barnes

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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
Place
Stopped
Magnanimity
Every
Sky
Raining
Would
Animals
Hint
Time
Rain
Unicorn
Instead
Hints
Animal
Restore
Bigs
Rainbow
Didn
Happier

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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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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.
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I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!
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The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
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Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
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One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
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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.
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You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
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we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
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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.
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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.
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