Quotes by Julian Barnes

“Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex”

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly”

“The secret of happiness is to be happy already”

“People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves”

“The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiac they slipped down the historical throat without touching the sides”

“Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things arent.”

“In soccer, the form of the encoded adjective is well-developed.”

“I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that Id ever write about Doyle,”

“I dont regard it as a historical novel, I regard it as a novel of now, which just happens to be set when it is set,”

“I was also interested in the racial side of it. Even today, the Chief of the London Metropolitan Police is trying to make the force more representative of London and theres a lot of resistance from the predominantly white force.”

“Im aware that people I have loved and have died and are in the spirit world looking after me.”

“George cant believe it but its true, thats what Doyle said to him,”

“I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces,”

“But I think you could make it truer by making it up. In a way when people say it could have been non-fiction, that is gratifying because Ive convinced them and they cant tell the bits Ive made up from the bits I didnt make up.”

“That form is very freeing, ... Its a great relief for the novelist not to have to be there in the way a third-person narrator implies. If you get rid of all that -- that judging entity -- you just leave the character alone with the reader.”

“Its the great drama, the great unknowable of most of our lives, ... We dont all paddle up the Amazon in a canoe and get shot at, but we do the equivalent of that (in our relationships).”

“Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it - and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever.”

“Talking It Over is the only one of my books people asked me what happened next, ... And they disagreed about what happened when the book concluded.”

“As Ive explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.”

“Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.”