Julian Barnes Quotes

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

When you read something, and especially when you're reading compellingly great, that becomes part of your identity, at least while you're reading it. You become changed by reading it.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.'

Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.

Books are a finer world within the world.

Everybody's idea of a great book is different, of course. For me it's one that makes my jaw drop on every page, the writing is so original.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Being influential is not the mark of a great book.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

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.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.'

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

One day at my grandmother's house, I discovered 'The Secret Garden' and read it. This was the first book I found entirely for myself, and I cherished it.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

To be transported into another world is my very favourite part of reading.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.