Quotes from Julian Barnes

How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren't having full sex, all the elements of it--the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust--were there anyway. And how part of me hadn't minded not going the whole way...This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, fear of an overwhelming closeness I couldn't handle.

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.

A facetious if logical question comes into George's mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.

everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story

No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.

The cure for sex is marriage;the cure for love is marriage;the cure for infidelity is divorce;the cure for unhappiness is work;the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink;the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.

That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.

perhaps it only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty

I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?

We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it's all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is - was - a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else.

If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours.

I was deeply misled by Lady Chatterley's Lover, which seemed to insist that running naked through damp undergrowth with wild flowers entwined in your pubic hair was just about the closest thing to heaven.

I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television.

Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.

Als je een goed boek leest, ontsnap je niet aan het leven, je stort je er juist dieper in. Er kan sprake zijn van een oppervlakkige ontsnapping – in verschillende landen, mores, spraakpatronen – maar wat je in wezen doet is je begrip versterken van de subtiliteiten, paradoxen, vreugde, pijn en waarheden van het leven. Leven en lezen zijn geen onderscheiden maar symbiotische waarden.

He had entered some state of grace—but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.

Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak

the complications of life do not end at the altar; some might say that this is where they begin.

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn't look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.

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? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen.

If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. —

atheism, which is mere emptiness and too depressing for words, and leads to socialism.