Julian Barnes Quotes

wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in w...

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of ev...

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented real...

Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say ...

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better ...

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’...

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more...

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds hi...

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though...

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. An...

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelih...

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotion...

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's ...

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the l...

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequac...

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a...

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes...

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or ...

I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from a...

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be releas...

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parent...

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But ...

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, y...

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfr...

...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate m...

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: tim...

I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life ...

Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. ...

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But...

In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communic...

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at,...

In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then th...

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seven...

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little to...

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted o...

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore ...

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insu...

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pa...

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each ...

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, y...

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the musi...

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. ...

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of ...

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doi...

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometim...

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad read...

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsi...

You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of th...

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autob...

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered l...

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he wo...

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully...

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another...

You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm af...

... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Fu...

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why shoul...

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was ir...

Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it ...

It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reali...

Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despa...

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who c...

Life always refused simplicity.

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely ...

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, a...

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what...

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling m...

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that d...

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, ...

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a su...

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagi...

Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciant...

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By...

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what ...

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no...

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your exc...

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would b...

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Ale...

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and exp...

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell...

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshe...

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to yo...