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Julian Barnes (Writer)

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

— Julian Barnes children

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

— Julian Barnes self

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

— Julian Barnes life

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

— Julian Barnes life

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

— Julian Barnes belief

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

— Julian Barnes men

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

— Julian Barnes emotion

Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.

— Julian Barnes love

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

— Julian Barnes night

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

— Julian Barnes time

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

— Julian Barnes life

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

— Julian Barnes truth

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

— Julian Barnes death

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.

— Julian Barnes action

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.

— Julian Barnes truth

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

— Julian Barnes art

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

— Julian Barnes art

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

— Julian Barnes hate

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

— Julian Barnes books

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

— Julian Barnes people

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

— Julian Barnes hope

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

— Julian Barnes time

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

— Julian Barnes time

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

— Julian Barnes change

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

— Julian Barnes will

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