Quotes from Julian Barnes

When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-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.

You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

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

I can't do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.

We're leaving, I told her one July afternoon. We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn't it?

There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.

My name is Stuart, and I remember everything.

Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it's read, and by the time it's trendy it's already a force for conservatism?

If you're going to be a grown-up," said Joan, "you've got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.

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

Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn't just about privacy, about an Englishman's home—even a pebbledash semi—being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.

Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.

The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.

Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot onto the pitch—See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football. But

between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish.

Io so una cosa per certo: che un tempo oggettivo esiste, ma che esiste anche quello soggettivo, quello che si porta sull'interno polso, proprio accanto alle pulsazioni cardiache. E questo tempo personale, che è poi anche quello autentico, si misura in funzione del nostro rapporto con i ricordi.

He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.