Julian Barnes Book Quotations

I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces,

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

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

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

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

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.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

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

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

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

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?