Julian Barnes Quotes

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

I'm interested in social commentary.

I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.

There's so much hate that we direct externally that we forget we have our own psychos. But that's the role of the satirist - you have to examine your own country and say, 'look!'

You were doing a TV show - you don't realise that you're also making social commentary at the same time.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.

I love to get to the underbelly of why people are up in arms about anything. Really, what I see is a big shadow in the West, in America especially, and everyone's afraid of looking stupid. But the truth is, I'm a genius and I'm stupid at the same time.

When I saw 'My Fair Lady,' I was surprised at how mean and misogynistic Henry was. Maybe that's why it's dropping out of public consciousness.

Satire doesn't effect change.

I could write a whole other book called 'I'm Judging You, America!' I still might.

I'm not a comedian. And I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor. I'm a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.

Monty Python never directly said, 'We're liberals' - they just did their sketches, and you had to figure it out. Generally, they were anti-establishment, of course, making fun of the people in power. I think, comedians, that's their job - pointing out what other people might not notice and going, 'Yoo-hoo, over here.'

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

I often find it maddening to live in America, in a way that is both amusing and horrifying to me. America clings to versions of itself that are absolutely hypocritical. I can't shake my outrage at it, so I write about it.

Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education.

Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

And yet humanity is so not evolved that how can you expect anything absolutely major to happen? Look how long, we move ahead in technology, how much do we move ahead in morality or emotion? We move ahead so minimally, minimally, minimally.

[Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.

Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost! (96)

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.