Quotes from Julian Barnes

Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.

Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.

I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.

He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him 'what he was', far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn't respond to.

But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed.

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.

You like this stuff?' she asked neutrally. 'Good to dance to,' I replied, a little defensively. 'Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?' 'No, not really.' Though of course I did.

One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn't justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.

The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

Once, we were talking about public reaction to some political scandal, and I suggested that it was normal for people to need someone to blame. 'Normal doesn't mean it's a good idea,' she answered.

Isn't there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?" "Like?" "Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?

And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

I didn't want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.

Beware of dreams," Elizabeth Finch replied. "Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.

Naquele tempo imaginávamo-nos fechados numa espécie de redil, à espera que nos soltassem para a vida. E, quando o momento chegasse, as nossas vidas - e o próprio tempo - acelarariam. Como podíamos saber que, de qualquer modo, as nossas vidas já haviam começado, que já levávamos vantagem, que algum dano já fora inflingido?

Monomania. Monogamy. Monotony. Nothing good begins this way.

Those in the middle got killed; governments and terrorists survived. At

Enforced monogamy is as much to say enforced happiness, which we know is not possible. Unenforced monogamy might seem possible. Romantic monogamy might seem to be desirable. But the first normally collapses back into a version of enforced monogamy, while the second is liable to become obsessive and hysterical. And thereby lies close to monomania. We should always distinguish between mutual passion and shared monomania.

If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words "heading," "stagnating" and "peaceable." I'd never thought of myself as peaceable—or its opposite—until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen's smiling profile on it.

This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.' 'Yes, that's just it, you are a worm indeed.