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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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"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all."
"We often forget to draw a new picture because we are so busy criticizing other paintings."
"A beautiful poem is nothing but a mirror of philosophy through which we can see life's pure beauty."
"Poets create a beautiful blue sky where you can fly with wings of imagination and find yourself again and again."
"The object of art is to enhance the beauty, imaginations and joy of life."
"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture."
"Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
"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."
"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."
"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."
"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."
"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."
"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."
"Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business."
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."
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