Julian Barnes Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

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

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

“Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”