Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary
Julian BarnesReading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Julian BarnesIn those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
Julian BarnesThe writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Julian BarnesA pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.
Julian BarnesPoets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.
Julian Barnes