Julian Barnes Quotes

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

Every love story is a potential grief story.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

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

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Was 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?

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.

Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]