"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."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Julian Barnes quotes (page 8 of 10)
196 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business."
Read quote
3 likes
"Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people."
Read quote
3 likes
"And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you’d do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It’s just as eloquent as speech."
Read quote
3 likes
"I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches."
Read quote
3 likes
"There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety."
Read quote
3 likes
"Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."
Read quote
3 likes
"A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too."
Read quote
3 likes
"Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death."
Read quote
3 likes
"Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain."
Read quote
3 likes
"Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]"
Read quote
3 likes
"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?"
Read quote
3 likes
"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?"
Read quote
3 likes