JULIAN BARNES QUOTES IV

English writer (1946- )

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but--mainly--to ourselves.

JULIAN BARNES

The Sense of an Ending

Tags: life quotes


Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else's hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That's a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don't know anything, yet you feel you know everything -- this can be calamitous.

JULIAN BARNES

interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018

Tags: love


He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

JULIAN BARNES

The Sense of an Ending

Tags: common sense quotes


Television didn't arrive in our household until I was about 10, so my imagination would have been first stirred by the printed word. Comics and the public library.

JULIAN BARNES

interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018

Tags: imagination