Julian Barnes Quotes

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

I have always enjoyed literature classes, and I took a fiction workshop for writing and analyzing at Curtis... I don't know if would do it professionally, but it's nice to have the balance with the music.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.