Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time. - Julian Barnes
Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks. - Julian Barnes
It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet. - Julian Barnes
Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern. - Julian Barnes
What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors," I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. - Julian Barnes
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. - Julian Barnes
..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. - Julian Barnes