Julian Barnes Quotes

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

I think the main thing to remember when writing a novel is to stay true to the characters.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.