Julian Barnes Writing Quotations

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

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

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

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

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.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

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

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

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

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.