Quotes from Julian Barnes

Perhaps Goethe never found the right woman.

He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.

you find yourself repeating, "They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

But if you think that only what is yours is yours, and that what is not your own is, just as it is, not your own, then no one will ever coerce you, no one will hinder you, you will blame no one, you will not accuse anyone, you will not do a single thing unwillingly, you will have no enemies, and no one will harm you, because you will not be harmed at all.

My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure.

When I tell people that she was the most grown-up person I have known, I suppose what I mean is that there were principles very close behind, if not actually embedded in, all her actions and thoughts.

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

Gradually, he didn't doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment.

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.

They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work.

People say of death, "There's nothing to be frightened of." They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. "There's NOTHING to be frightened of." Jules Renard: "The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word 'nothing.

If I asked you "What is life?", you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence

Je zit er nog middenin. Je zult er altijd middenin blijven zitten. Nee, niet letterlijk. Maar in je hart. Niets houdt ooit op, niet als het zo diep is gaan zitten. Je zult altijd met een open wond blijven rondlopen. Dat is na verloop van tijd nog de enige keus. Met een open wond rondlopen of dood. Denk je ook niet?

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

She'd been imagining for the last fifteen or more years that if you disappeared, if you abandoned a wife and child, you did so for a better life: more happiness, more sex, more money, more of whatever was missing from your previous life.

Viver sozinho tem momentos de auto-comiseração e paranóia.

In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.

In other words, in order to believe in what we think our nation stands for, we must constantly, every day, in small acts or thoughts and large, deceive ourselves

I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.

strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority.

You find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, don't they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.