Julian Barnes Short Quotes

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If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Julian Barnes
But that's one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

Julian Barnes
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Julian Barnes
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

Julian Barnes
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Julian Barnes
Irony — The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Julian Barnes
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

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

Julian Barnes
Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

Julian Barnes
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

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

Julian Barnes
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability.

Julian Barnes
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

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

Julian Barnes
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

Julian Barnes
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.

Julian Barnes
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Julian Barnes
You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

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

Julian Barnes
God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

Julian Barnes
At fifty-four, he thinks a lot of things, he believes a few, but what can he really claim to know?

Julian Barnes
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Julian Barnes
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

Julian Barnes
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

Julian Barnes
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

Julian Barnes
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

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

Julian Barnes
Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

Julian Barnes
Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

Julian Barnes