JULIAN BARNES QUOTES IV

English writer (1946- )

Opera cuts to the chase--as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

JULIAN BARNES

Levels of Life

Tags: opera 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