Julian Barnes
In 2011, Julian Barnes won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending, one of the most closely watched literary awards in the English-speaking world.
Born on 19 January 1946 in Leicester, Barnes was educated at the City of London School and later at Magdalen College. His career has taken in an unusually wide range of work: he has been a journalist, a literary critic, a translator, and a lexicographer, as well as a novelist and essayist. He writes in English and holds British citizenship. His output has also drawn descriptions as science fiction in some quarters, pointing to the breadth of his interests across different forms and genres.
Over the course of his career, Barnes has accumulated a substantial number of honours from several countries. In France, he received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and the Prix Femina étranger. From the English-speaking world he collected the Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award. He has also received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Siegfried Lenz Prize, and the Shakespeare Prize, reflecting the reach of his work across European literary culture. The Booker Prize, awarded for The Sense of an Ending, remains among the most prominent of these recognitions, and that novel continues to be the work most directly associated with his name in prize history.
Quotes by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes's insights on:
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.
But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.
Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.
Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.
I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let.
We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.
And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come.
Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.