Julian Barnes Quotes

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

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

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

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

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

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

Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

I don't believe in God, but I miss him.

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

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.

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

The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

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

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

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

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

History is the lies of the victors.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

The more you learn, the less you fear.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

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

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

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