Julian Barnes
What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.Collection: Self
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.Collection: Might
We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?Collection: Progress
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.Collection: Travel
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.Collection: Selfish
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.Collection: Memories
Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?Collection: Echoes
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?Collection: Should
I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.Collection: Pretending
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.Collection: Escaping
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.Collection: Reader
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.Collection: Pretending
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.Collection: Pain
Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.Collection: Sex
Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.Collection: Religious
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.Collection: Eye
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.Collection: Strong
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.Collection: Book
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.Collection: Beautiful
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. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.Collection: Strong
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.Collection: Dream
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.Collection: Mean
Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.Collection: Ironic
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.Collection: Giving
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.Collection: Simple
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.Collection: Literature
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.Collection: Nostalgia
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.Collection: Memories
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.Collection: Memories
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.Collection: People
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.Collection: Relationship
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.Collection: Love Is
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.Collection: Wine
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.Collection: Struggle
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.Collection: Heart
You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.Collection: Views
The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.Collection: Hurt
we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at deathCollection: Looks
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.Collection: World
Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.Collection: Sex
I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.Collection: Too Much
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.Collection: Baby
The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.Collection: Rain
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?Collection: Thought Provoking
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.Collection: Suicide
Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?Collection: Giving
He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.Collection: Grief
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.Collection: Home
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?Collection: Book