Top 29 Quotes by Julian Barnes

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

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.

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

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

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

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

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