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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

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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
Work
Literature
Society
Art
Order
Oppressive
Nature
Valued
Truth
Highly
Sometimes
Telling
Different
Elements

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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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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
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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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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?
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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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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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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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History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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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.
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Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
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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.
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
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Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
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His air of failure had nothing desperate about it rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.
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Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
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