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Books Quotes by Julian Barnes

62 Books quotes by Julian Barnes

All Books quotes Julian Barnes’s page

Barnes says reading is a skill that most people have, but true reading is a minority art. He points out that printed books feel like knowledge, while e‑readers feel like raw information. He also suggests that a writer who behaves like a reader will write better.

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“When we're onstage we're not literature, we're sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.”

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

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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

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

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Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

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

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

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

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“I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as…

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[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

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“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents- were they the…

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Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we…

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“Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.”

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“What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in…

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Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well…

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“[Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth…

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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape…

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“Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable…

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“I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always…

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“...perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which…

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“I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further,…

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“It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness…

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“It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility;…

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“In a novel, all his life's anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria - all would have been…

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“How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the…

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“Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in…

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“I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This…

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“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff…

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“Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art…

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“I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the…

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“Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing…

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“Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on…

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“I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they…

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“That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to…

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“I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have?…

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“Books are not life, however much we may wish they were”

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

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..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

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

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

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More by Julian Barnes

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time,…

“I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies…

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.”

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves.…

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon…

“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely,…

“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island,…

“In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone…

“My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a…

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

“Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated.…

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s…

“And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh,…