707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

But I think you could make it truer by making it up. In a way when people say it could have been non-fiction, that is gratifying because I've convinced them and they can't tell the bits I've made up from the bits I didn't make up.

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 don't regard it as a historical novel, I regard it as a novel of now, which just happens to be set when it is set,

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

George can't believe it but it's true, that's what Doyle said to him,

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

He came attached to the case. ... I didn't know much about his biography before I started, and I hadn't read him since I was 20, I suppose. But in the process of research and writing, I found him to be a very admirable and a moral and warmhearted person.

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

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.