Flaubert's Parrot QUOTES

2 " To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

4 " Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

6 " The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

8 " If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

10 " The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it? "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

12 " [Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

14 " Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

16 " The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

18 " (on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot

20 " When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be. "

― Julian Barnes , Flaubert's Parrot