Quotes by Julian Barnes

“The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means its giving way to something else.”

“What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also...”

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”

“The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicides reasoning might impugn the nature and value ...”

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.”

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

“Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let every...”

“The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operati...”

“If the writer were more like a reader, hed be a reader, not a writer. Its as uncomplicated as that.”

“What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.”

“The imagination doesnt crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatevers there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of gl...”

“Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.”

“Life is a bit like reading. If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that its yours....”

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took ...”

“It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a hand...”

“Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.”

“When you read a great book, you dont escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape into different countries, mores, speech patterns but what you are essentially d...”

“Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.”

“He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them...”

“He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone in...”