Julian Barnes People Quotations

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

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

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.

Talking It Over' is the only one of my books people asked me what happened next, ... And they disagreed about what happened when the book concluded.

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

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

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

People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

I think he had a quite sort of ambiguous relationship to Holmes. It made him rich, it made him famous, but as often the case with these things, a writer can turn against his or her most successful creation; hence, he killed him off (in 'The Adventure of the Final Problem') and brought him back by popular request. And, of course, people did sort of confuse them and assume if he could invent these complicated mysteries, then he could also solve them.