Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot (1984)

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Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

Julian Barnes
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Julian Barnes
Pride makes us long for a solution to things — a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

Julian Barnes
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

Julian Barnes
When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again.

Julian Barnes
You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

Julian Barnes
Whores — Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

Julian Barnes
Irony — The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Julian Barnes
Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French for life-jacket.

Julian Barnes
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Julian Barnes
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

Julian Barnes
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Julian Barnes
You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

Julian Barnes
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

Julian Barnes
He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

Julian Barnes
He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

Julian Barnes
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Julian Barnes
I don't care much for coincidences. There's something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dragging coarse hints about a cosmic plan.

Julian Barnes
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

Julian Barnes