Quotes from Julian Barnes

If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left.

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.

When we're onstage we're not literature, we're sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another

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 physical book and the physical bookshop.

This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten?

It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.

every relationship contains within it the ghosts, or the shadows, of all the other relationships it isn't. All the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices, the lives you could have led but didn't and haven't.

The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.

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 real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

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.

He thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it.

I wish life was like banking,' I said. 'I don't mean it's straightforward. Some of it's incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there's someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it's too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven't understood it.

Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.

People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.

And mental states may be inferred from actions. The tyrant rarely sends a handwritten note requesting the elimination of an enemy.

There's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.

After a long analysis of Robson's suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet's numbers constant.

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?

Metti insieme due persone che insieme non sono mai state; a volte il mondo cambia e a volte no. Può darsi che si schiantino e prendano fuoco, o che prendano fuoco e si schiantino. Ma a volte, invece, ne nasce qualcosa di nuovo, e allora il mondo cambia. Insieme, in quel primo momento esaltante, con quella sensazione esplosiva di ascesa, esse sono più grandi dei loro sé individuali. Insieme, vedono più lontano, più chiaro.

There is the question of accumulation (...) just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

If you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.