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Writer Quotes by Julian Barnes

49 Writer quotes by Julian Barnes

All Writer quotes Julian Barnes’s page

Julian Barnes notes that a writer’s life is full of frailty, yet the work itself matters most. He points out that books feel like knowledge while e‑readers feel like plain information. He also says fiction should mirror the world’s tangled complications, and that a writer who reads like a reader stays honest.

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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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This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

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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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When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

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“The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.”

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It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

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“how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest…

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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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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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“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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“Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way…

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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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The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her…

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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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“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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“...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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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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“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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The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into…

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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon…

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“It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than…

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“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where…

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

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

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

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“What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.”

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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

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

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

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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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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to…

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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,…