Julian Barnes Quotes

We can only love what we know.

You really know a person when you sleep so near to them, or when you eat with them.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

I find the closer you get to people, the harder it is to satirise them.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I'd rather kiss my best friend than kiss some random guy.

There's a bizarre comfort and safety in doing your last and most intimate scenes with the actor you've worked most closely.

I think, when you get to know somebody on a personal level were you truly understand what makes them tick, what they play for, things they like to do in their spare time, you're around their families, I think you're kind of able to kind of coexist more when you have a relationship.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

You can only be loved to the extent that you are known.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.

Love may have the longest arms, but it can still fall short of an embrace.

This was what happened after you'd been together with someone a long time. You loved that it was old and worn and comfy, but sometimes it was old and worn and comfy.

Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

He stepped toward her, and her heart just ached from it. His face was so handsome, and so dear, and so perfectly wonderfully familiar. She knew the slope of his cheeks, and the exact shade of his eys, brownish near the iris, melting into green at the edge. And his mouth-she knew that mouth, the look of it, the feel of it. She knew his smile, and she knew his frown, and she knew- she knew far to much.