Julian Barnes Quotes

People are the story they tell themselves.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

You can use your story, or your story can use you.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

We all have our own story. And we stay attached to our story. This can stop us from growing and living. You wanna make your life better? Change your story, change your life.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.

Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.