"He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really ...
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
~ Julian Barnes ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
More Julian Barnes quotes
"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into...
"how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the phy...
"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.
"In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a wor...
"Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.
"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 fa...
"..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
"Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deser...
"Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asl...
"When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores...
"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
"Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how...
"If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had h...