Julian Barnes Quotes

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

Perception is not always reality.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

The truth often does sound unconvincing.

Perception and reality are two different things.

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

... if a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind.

What people believe prevails over the truth.

Truth wasn't something you went out and found. It was wide and vast and deep and unending, and all you could hope to see was a tiny part of it. And to see that part and to mistake it for the whole was to make of Truth a lie.