Quotes by "Julian Barnes"

The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

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.

You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

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.

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?

Я хочу встретить такого мужчину, который, когда узнаешь его получше, будет таким же, каким кажется, когда вы только познакомились. Я хочу встретить такого мужчину, который звонит, если пообещал позвонить и приходит домой, если пообещал, что придет. Я хочу встретить такого мужчину, которого устраивает то, какой он есть. Я хочу встретить такого мужчину, который хочет встретить такую женщину, как я. Ведь это не слишком много? Хотя, как утверждает моя подруга Марсель, это все равно, что хотеть луну с неба и звезды впридачу.

Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - than love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

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

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...

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

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. Margaret’s

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

What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? “As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. 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.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.