Quotes from Julian Barnes

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

My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a bloody good long shit.

Why do you think this great nation of ours loves the Royal Family? Gun Law. If we didn't have it, you'd be asking the opposite question.

But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents- were they the stuff of Literature?

Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.

Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

I was too far away to observe what color Enid Starkie's eyes were; all I remember of her is that she dressed like a matelot, walked like a scrum-half, and had an atrocious French accent.

most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties—or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian's action an implied

Nothing else mattered. Of course there was "the rest of my life," both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that's not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn't. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though "sacrifice" implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss.

The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.

What happened to the truth is not recorded.

Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs.

At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist.

If I call myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn't because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

poetry's packaged as a late-night slot, a quote minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something.

The diary was evidence; it was—it might be—corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what.

If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn't been Tony.

El arte siempre tiene al tiempo de su parte

Hoe vaak vertellen we ons eigen levensverhaal? Hoe vaak stellen we bij, verfraaien we, laten we handig dingen weg? En hoe langer het leven doorgaat, hoe minder er om ons heen overblijven om onze versie te betwisten, ons eraan te herinneren dat ons leven niet ons leven is, maar alleen het verhaal dat wij erover verteld hebben. Verteld aan anderen, maar - voornamelijk - aan onzelf.

Silent or gagged women are powerless women. A powerful woman is one who can speak out to challenge existing power structures or to explore previously taboo territory.