Julian Barnes Quotes

It's possible of course, especially when you're young, to read a book and take it to your heart. And you don't need to speak to anybody about it - it's so important to you: You have found it.

'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides left me both moved and, at times, laughing out loud in delight.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

Remembering is a great invention of the mind.

Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

Memory. My poison, my food.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

Imagine! It is the real power of a book--not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.

A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.