Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have?… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon… — 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
“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
