“I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest… — 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
“How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself. — 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
“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 Image
“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 Image
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
