Disable ads!

29 quotes by Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short...
Read full biography of Julian Barnes →

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

0

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

0

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

0

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

0

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one... →

0

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

0

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

0

Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre... →

0

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

0

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

0

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

0

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced... →

0

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

0
Add a quote!
Background photo by Giuliana