February 20, 2018

From The Guardian (Julian Barnes on "What books are on your bedside table?"):

Keith Vaughan’s Journals, James Fenton’s Selected Poems, Posy Simmonds’s Literary Life, Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike. But on top of them are my more usual bedtime reading: copies of Private Eye and The Art Newspaper.

From The Guardian (Julian Barnes on "Which came to you first: the characters, their situation or the book’s themes of innocence and experience?"):

The situation, as it always does. I never start by making up a bunch of characters and then wonder what might happen to them. I think of a situation, an impossible dilemma, a moral or emotional quandary, and then wonder to whom it might happen and when and where. In part, this novel came out of The Sense of an Ending, in which there is a central relationship between a young man and a middle-aged woman, about which we are told nothing. We just have to intuit what it must have been like from the scantiest of evidence. Here, we are told all, though this couple is different from that couple.

From The TLS (Steven Pinker on "What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?"):

When I crossed over from academic to popular writing, a university press editor advised me not to make the common professor’s mistake of talking down to readers, as if they were semi-literate chicken pluckers. Think of them, she said, as if they are as smart as you are, but happen not to know something that you know.

From Harper's:

By measuring artificial-sweetener levels in swimming pools, Canadian scientists deduced significant concentrations of urine.

By Gore Vidal:

Never offend an enemy in a small way.