List of Julian Barnes Quotes

I'm One Of Those Writers Who Started Off Writing Novels And Came To Writing Short Stories Later, Partly Because I Didn't Have The Right Ideas, Partly Because I Think That Short Stories Are More Difficult. I Think Learning To Write Short Stories Also Made Me Attracted Toward A Paring Down Of The Novel Form.

You Can't Have A Novel Without Real, Believable People, And Once You Get Into Either Too Theoretical A Novel Or Too Philosophical A Novel, You Get Into The Dangers That The French Novel Has Discovered In The Past 50 Or 60 Years. And You Get Into A Sort Of Aridity. No, You Have To Have Real, Identifiable People To Whom The Reader Reacts In A Way As If They Were Real People.

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.

In Those Days, We Imagined Ourselves As Being Kept In Some Kind Of Holding Pen, Waiting To Be Released Into Our Lives. And When The Moment Came, Our Lives -- And Time Itself -- Would Speed Up. How Were We To Know That Our Lives Had In Any Case Begun, That Some Advantage Had Already Been Gained, Some Damage Already Inflicted? Also, That Our Release Would Only Be Into A Larger Holding Pen, Whose Boundaries Would Be At First Undiscernible.

And That Was All The Part Of It - The Way You Were Obliged To Live. You Stifled A Groan, You Lied About Your Love, You Deceived Your Legal Wife, And All In The Name Of Honour. That Was The Damned Paradox Of It - In Order To Behave Well, You Have To Behave Badly.

You Get Towards The End Of Life - No, Not Life Itself, But Of Something Else: The End Of Any Likelihood Of Change In That Life. You Are Allowed A Long Moment Of Pause, Time Enough To Ask The Question: What Else Have I Done Wrong?

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.

The Writer Has Little Control Over Personal Temperament, None Over Historical Moment, And Is Only Partly In Charge Of His Or Her Own Aesthetic.

Grief Seems At First To Destroy Not Just All Patterns, But Also To Destroy A Belief That A Pattern Exists.

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!

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.

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.

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?

I'm A Complete Democrat In Terms Of Who Buys My Books.

Grief Reconfigures Time, Its Length, Its Texture, Its Function: One Day Means No More Than The Next, So Why Have They Been Picked Out And Given Separate Names?

Whisky, I Find, Helps Clarity Of Thought. And Reduces Pain. It Has The Additional Virtue Of Making You Drunk Or, If Taken In Sufficient Quantity, Very Drunk.

The Writer's Life [is] Full Of Frailty And Defeat Like Any Other Life. What Counts Is The Work. Yet The Work Can Quite Easily Be Buried, Or Half-buried, By The Life.

It's Easy, After All, Not To Be A Writer. Most People Aren't Writers, And Very Little Harm Comes To Them.

A Couple's First Task, It Has Always Seemed To Me, Is To Solve The Problem Of Breakfast; If This Can Be Worked Out Amicably, Most Other Difficulties Can Too.

You Put Together Two People Who Have Not Been Put Together Before. Sometimes It Is Like That First Attempt To Harness A Hydrogen Balloon To A Fire Balloon: Do You Prefer Crash And Burn, Or Burn And Crash? But Sometimes It Works, And Something New Is Made, And The World Is Changed. Then, At Some Point, Sooner Or Later, For This Reason Or That, One Of Them Is Taken Away. And What Is Taken Away Is Greater Than The Sum Of What Was There. This May Not Be Mathematically Possible; But It Is Emotionally Possible.

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?

Alice Munro Can Move Characters Through Time In A Way That No Other Writer Can.

Memory Is Identity....you Are What You Have Done; What You Have Done Is In Your Memory; What You Remember Defines Who You Are; When You Forget Your Life You Cease To Be, Even Before Your Death.

He Thought Of Trying To Explain Something He Had Recently Noticed About Himself: That If Anyone Insulted Him, Or One Of His Friends, He Didn't Really Mind--or Not Much, Anyway. Whereas If Anyone Insulted A Novel, A Story, A Poem That He Loved, Something Visceral And Volcanic Occurred Within Him. He Wasn't Sure What This Might Mean--except Perhaps That He Had Got Life And Art Mixed Up, Back To Front, Upside Down.