English writer (1946- )
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
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
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
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