I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
Julian BarnesWas it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?
Julian BarnesYou can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.
Julian Barnes