707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Samo oni koji vide šta će se dogoditi prežive, mora da je to pravilo.

Era ciudat felul în care, pe măsură ce îmbătrâneai, vanitatea era tot mai puțin un viciu și devenea aproape opusul ei: o cerință morală.

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.

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 did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle,

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

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

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.

He left no trace apart from the local papers and Doyle's own account of the case. He really had to be invented from the ground up.