Top 29 Quotes by Julian Barnes

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

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

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

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

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

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?

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

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

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.