Julian Barnes

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

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

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

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.

Mystification is simple clarity is the hardest thing of all.

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

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

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

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

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

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

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 of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.

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

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

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

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.

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

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 complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

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

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

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

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

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