Quote

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

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
Young
Nothing
Something
Fascinate
Fascinated
Genius
Wrong
Rather

More quotes by Julian Barnes

Image
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
Julian Barnes
Image
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
Julian Barnes
Image
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
Image
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
Julian Barnes
Image
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
Julian Barnes
Image
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Julian Barnes
Image
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
Julian Barnes
Image
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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
WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian Barnes
Image
When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
Julian Barnes
Image
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
Julian Barnes
Image
To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Julian Barnes
Image
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
Image
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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
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
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
Julian Barnes