Julian Barnes Quotes

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.

If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.

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

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

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

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

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

you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

Throw off your grief, ' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

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

...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

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

Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.

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

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together

Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

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

There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.

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

I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

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