What can’t be escaped from, and runs all through the collection of stories, is memory. The escapee must always return, mentally or physically, if not both.
Barnes, Julian.
Here come the desolating consolations of age. Escape may not lead to freedom; the skin remembers; the body rebels. Even adultery, that old reliable, becomes less commanding an impulse, easily loses its thrall.
Barnes, Julian.
That there can be beauty (and, for some, eroticism) in destruction is unarguable.
Barnes, Julian.
When I was told about George's story, I started thinking about why some people are remembered forever, and others are not at all.
Barnes, Julian.
Well, I'm not going to tell people why they should read me. That sort of thing is for politicians.
Barnes, Julian.
As a writer you decline life. There's no way to be a writer without spending a lot of time by yourself, in a study, with a piece of paper. And, while you're doing that, on the whole, you are not finding the Northwest Passage. And, on the whole, the guy who finds the Northwest Passage can't put a pen to paper. And long may it stay so.
Barnes, Julian.
One of the wisest things that great Ford Maddox Ford said at some point, "You marry to continue the conversation." Which I thought was brilliant...I think they do change, but as long as there are still conversations.
Barnes, Julian.
One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous.
Barnes, Julian. "On We Sail" in: London Review of Books. 31, 21, November 4, 2009.
It’s easy to read the book innocently, trusting the narrator, believing his account of things, and letting yourself be carried along as by an unthreatening breeze. Maupassant is often called ‘a natural storyteller’: that’s to say, a professional, practised, unnatural storyteller.
Barnes, Julian. "On We Sail" in: London Review of Books. 31, 21, November 4, 2009.
These sections of nautical travelogue are engaging enough; but ‘afloat’ implies its counterpart, ‘ashore’, and it is here that the tone darkens and the book becomes more self-revealing. Afloat you are as free as the weather allows you to be; you are surrounded by nature; and you are (forgetting the crew) as solitary as you need and want to be. Ashore is where the problems start, because ashore is full of other people.
Barnes, Julian. "On We Sail" in: London Review of Books. 31, 21, November 4, 2009.
But isn’t translation about being helpful to the reader, conveying in English what would be conveyed in the French to a French reader? Yes, but many French readers – to judge by the Folio edition, which annotates the name of Vauban – no longer know who the famous fortifier was either.
Barnes, Julian. "On We Sail" in: London Review of Books. 31, 21, November 4, 2009.
And sometimes the nature of the writer's oeuvre creates a problem of choice ... Should you choose one of those previously unopened? Or go for one you suspect you misread, or undervalued, at the time? Or one, likeCouples, which you might have read for somewhat non-literary reasons?
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
And even when, too exhausted to do anything, I fell back on the hotel minibar and the television, I found I was only replicating Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's preferred way of ingesting politics and current events. After three weeks, both Harry and I found ourselves in Florida, "death's favourite state", as he puts it in the final volume, Rabbit at Rest. Harry died; the book ended; my tour was over.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
Harry is site-specific, slobbish, lust-driven, passive, patriotic, hard-hearted, prejudiced, puzzled, anxious. Yet familiarity renders him likeable – for his humour, his doggedness, his candour, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgments – for example, preferring Perry Como to Frank Sinatra. But Updike was disappointed when readers went further and claimed they found Rabbit lovable: "My intention was never to make him – or any character – lovable." Instead, Harry is typical, and it takes an outsider to tell him so.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
Whereas in my first reading I was overwhelmed by Updike's joy of description, his passionate attentiveness to such things as "the clunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting" – by what he called, in the preface to his The Early Stories, "giving the mundane its beautiful due" – in my second I was increasingly aware of this underlying sense of things being already over, of the tug of dying and death.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
Any future historian wanting to understand the texture, smell, feel and meaning of bluey-white-collar life in ordinary America between the 1950s and the 1990s will need little more than the Rabbit quartet. But that implies only sociological rather than artistic virtue. So let's just repeat: still the greatest postwar American novel.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
The younger writer is avid for the world and its description; the older writer, while still avid for description, is more suspicious about the world, both what it is and whom it might be for: “It has taken old age,” the narrator of “The Full Glass” reflects, “to make me realize that the world exists for young people.” But the older writer has also realized the extent and limitations of his own myth kitty, and learned how best to eke it out.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
But just as Hemingway, the supposed hymner of masculine courage, writes best about cowardice, so Updike, delineator of conventional, continuing America, is incessantly writing about flight.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
Impossible not to think of and feel for Updike as he tapped out that sentence and then added his last full stop, his fictional endpoint. Impossible equally not to honor and thank him with a reader’s raised glass, full to the brim—though preferably not with water.
Barnes, Julian. "Running Away" in: The Guardian. October 17, 2009.
If you want a one-word introduction to the tone, sensibility and modernity of Arthur Hugh Clough, you have it in that single, italicised (by him, not me) word: rubbishy. He will not subscribe to the required tenets of his country's established religion if his conscience and intellect tell him otherwise; similarly, he will not subscribe to presumptions of grandeur and beauty if his eyes and aesthetic antennae tell him otherwise. Nor was this some initial irreverence, the grumpy consequence of baggage loss or digestive calamity.
Barnes, Julian. "When in Rome." in: The Guardian. April 18, 2009.
At the poem's centre is a debate about "exact thinking", and how such thinking translates into action, and whether emotion as opposed to reason is ever a justifiable ground for action, and whether action is ever worth it in the first place - though of course if were to be so, then it must first be based on absolutely exact thinking - and, as any sensible reader will swiftly deduce, this is exactly the sort of over-analytical "pother" (Claude's word) which is most discouraging to a woman who might be inclined to think that you might be inclined to be in love with her.
Barnes, Julian. "When in Rome." in: The Guardian. April 18, 2009.
Yes, it is my other country. There is something about it -- its history, its landscape -- that obviously sparks my imagination, or one area of my imagination. It's a language I know well, it's a literature I know well. A lot of my intellectual points of reference are French rather than English. And I love provincial France.
Barnes, Julian. "When in Rome." in: The Guardian. April 18, 2009.
But Englishmen of a certain class—especially those sent away to boarding schools—tend toward obsessive memory, looking back on those immured years as either an expulsion from the familial Eden and a traumatic introduction to the concept of alien power, or else as the opposite, a golden and protected spell of time before life’s realities intrude.
Barnes, Julian. "Such, Such Was Eric Blair." in: New York Review of Books. 56.4, March 12, 2009.
When it comes to the dead, it is hard to retain, or posthumously acquire, treasuredom.
Barnes, Julian. "Such, Such Was Eric Blair." in: New York Review of Books. 56.4, March 12, 2009.
Being a great writer in itself has little to do with the matter. The important factors are: (1) an ambassadorial quality, an ability to present the nation to itself, and represent it abroad, in a way it wishes to be presented and represented. (2) An element of malleability and interpretability. The malleability allows the writer to be given a more appealing, if not entirely untruthful, image; the interpretability means that we can find in him or her more or less whatever we require. (3) The writer, even if critical of his or her country, must have a patriotic core, or what appears to be one.
Barnes, Julian. "Such, Such Was Eric Blair." in: New York Review of Books. 56.4, March 12, 2009.
If “all art is to some extent propaganda,” then are we not to suppose that the laws of propaganda apply even if you are on the side of truth, justice, and the angels?
Barnes, Julian. "Such, Such Was Eric Blair." in: New York Review of Books. 56.4, March 12, 2009.
You are constantly making decisions like that. For example, he was a great imperialist and at a certain point he went to the South African war. He goes on to write a multi-volume history of it, and is knighted for it. As a fiction writer, do you need him to go to South Africa? If you were a biographer, he would have to go there because he did. But then you think, "I'm not a biographer. If I send him to South Africa there has got to be a purpose." So things could go either way. And obviously, yes, there are chunks of his life that you leave out.
Barnes, Julian and George Lewis (Interviewer). "Julian and Arthur and George." Author Interviews. in: Powell's Books. February 13, 2006.
I think it is partly to do with power. When you are the most powerful country in the world, as Britain used to be, you tend to celebrate only your power; you don't appreciate difference or otherness, you only see it as inferiority. And you don't see your history as a moral, exploited, or inferior power does. But I think America is a special case, as opposed to Britain, in terms of having short-term memory.
Barnes, Julian and George Lewis (Interviewer). "Julian and Arthur and George." Author Interviews. in: Powell's Books. February 13, 2006.
So, it's like the way Dentists build up bridges in your mouth: they have certain pins which they put in certain teeth places, and then, on that, once they've got those in place, they know that they can build a solid structure. Those are five or six of the posts on which the rest of the structure can rest. Obviously, what you're balancing is narrative drive, narrative continuation, against the pleasures of going off the tangent and writing separate discrete chapters which don't follow the straightforward narrative through, but exists there, in some parallel relationship to it, or explain it indirectly.
Barnes, Jules and Nicole Terrien and Vanessa Guignery (Interviewers)."Jules Barnes in Conversation." in: Cercles. 2002.
There comes a point, though, when most novelists run out of the ability to explain, and you say at this point, i.e. now: 'I did it because it feels right, I did it because I thought that chapter would work better - I can't explain more than the words 'work better' say - by putting it there rather than here.
Barnes, Jules and Nicole Terrien and Vanessa Guignery (Interviewers)."Julian Barnes in Conversation." in: Cercles. 2002.
Brett Ellis is regarded as a possibly dangerous and corrupt human being because of what he writes. Whereas Jay is regarded as a metropolitan slicker and therefore not worth taking seriously. In dealing with writers, as in most things in America, all tendencies are exaggerated. We get some of it in Britain, but then success is not as great as success in America.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
It's probably not mainstream American, but the notion that irony somehow got dropped off the back of all the [ocean] liners that crossed the Atlantic is just ridiculous. Jewish irony for a start. It's a great tradition.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
You couldn't not say that Woody Allen doesn't deal in irony. Does he not? His humor is pretty Jewish. On the whole the beauty of this form, for a novelist, is that you disappear as a writer. You as a controlling narrator. You leave the reader alone with views of the characters. And the reader makes up his or her own mind.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
For everyone who likes my books there will be someone who doesn't. Fine, read someone else. Sorry I didn't convince you. But that's it, you know.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
Fiction is the supreme fiction. And everybody's autobiography is a fiction but not the supreme fiction.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
Fiction is the supreme fiction. And everybody's autobiography is a fiction but not the supreme fiction.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
The places where the truth comes from are now less various than they used to be. Especially with the decline of the truth of religion as generally not believed anymore. The truths offered by the state seem much less reliable than they used to. And the truths of journalism are a bit hit-and-miss, as we know. And also often hugely influenced by established and corporate money. That seems to me to leave us with the truths of art. To which I cling to both as someone who lives by the arts in both senses.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
It's about freedom and optimism. It could almost be written into your constitution: “Everyone has the right to change their career and their emotional and moral status several times.” Everyone has the right to be forgiven. That's another thing that is deeply American. You love forgiving people. You love executing them as well. You love killing them and you love forgiving them.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
It is ["the ultimate challenge"] to have sex and easy to fall in love and its hard to keep it fresh. Raymond Chandler wrote a letter to a friend of his who was getting married which was full of advice. At the end it said, "Always remember that marriage is like a newspaper, it has to be made fresh every damned day of every damned year." That's very difficult and it demands...apart from basic questions of love and sex...it demands tenderness, thoughtfulness and giving of space and also knowing what you want and respecting what the other person wants and so on and so forth. Also, it necessitates a continuing interest in the other person.
Barnes, Julian and Robert Birnbaum (Interviewer). "Julian Barnes, Author of Love, etc. talks with Robert Birnbaum." in: Identity Theory. 2001.
Sometimes you just give in. A lot of the time you want to say, look, I made it up, it's fiction. You can't fact-check fiction, or you can only fact-check it to a point.
Barnes, Julian and Carl Swanson (Interviewer). "Old Fartery and Literary Dish." Interview with Julian Barnes. in: Salon. 1996.
You don't think about yourself until people discuss you in front of you. And so when I'm here in this country I sometimes find I'm half-accused of being too continental, too intellectual, too French.
Barnes, Julian and Carl Swanson (Interviewer). "Old Fartery and Literary Dish." Interview with Julian Barnes. in: Salon. 1996.
I think everybody needs another country. And there's a bit about that in the final chapter in the book. You need another country on which to project, perhaps, your romanticism and idealism. I think this is a good idea, but I don't think it happens to most people. Most people think mostly about their own country, and idealize their own country, and I think that's dangerous. I think one's own country should be scrupulously and skeptically examined. And you should allow your idealism and romanticism to be projected onto something else.
Barnes, Julian and Carl Swanson (Interviewer). "Old Fartery and Literary Dish." Interview with Julian Barnes. in: Salon. 1996.
Often you find, especially in publishing, that people move on so fast from one house to another that they've jumped from one ship you're on to another ship you're on.
Barnes, Julian and Carl Swanson (Interviewer). "Old Fartery and Literary Dish." Interview with Julian Barnes. in: Salon. 1996.
No. I never thought I'd be a writer, but I can't imagine now, looking back, anything else I'd rather have been. But I never thought I'd turn out to be a writer when I was 15, 20, 25. Not a fiction writer. I always thought I'd do a job which I didn't enjoy much.
Barnes, Julian and Carl Swanson (Interviewer). "Old Fartery and Literary Dish." Interview with Julian Barnes. in: Salon. 1996.
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)
