The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Look, writers aren't perfect , I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“...perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough? — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can. — Julian Barnes Copy Share
How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves.… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“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… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“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.… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
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… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
“And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share
![“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.” quote by Julian Barnes](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/176/julian-barnes-522_buried_the-writer-s-life-is-full-of-frailty-and_181140.png)
