English writer (1946- )
Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else's hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That's a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don't know anything, yet you feel you know everything -- this can be calamitous.
JULIAN BARNES
interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018
Opera cuts to the chase--as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
JULIAN BARNES
Levels of Life
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Television didn't arrive in our household until I was about 10, so my imagination would have been first stirred by the printed word. Comics and the public library.
JULIAN BARNES
interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018