Quote

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

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
Failure
Loss
Also
Life
Subtraction
Multiplication
Addition
Accumulation

More quotes by Julian Barnes

Image
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
Image
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
Julian Barnes
Image
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
Julian Barnes
Image
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
Image
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
Image
I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
Julian Barnes
Image
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
Julian Barnes
Image
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
Image
The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
Image
But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
Julian Barnes
Image
Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.
Julian Barnes
Image
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
Image
If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
Julian Barnes
Image
History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Julian Barnes
Image
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.
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
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.
Julian Barnes
Image
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Julian Barnes