Quotes from Julian Barnes

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes (the ignorant eye triumphs – how galling for the informed eye).

marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.

he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. 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.

someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.

We didn't do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath.

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.

History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn't recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

specific fund, you see. It's a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It's about the only thing human beings have in common.

Vivimos con suposiciones muy fáciles, ¿no? Por ejemplo, que la memoria es igual a sucesos más tiempo. Pero es algo mucho más extraño. ¿Quién dijo que la memoria es lo que creíamos que habíamos olvidado? Y debería ser obvio que el tiempo no actúa como un fijador, sino más bien como un disolvente. Pero no conviene —no es útil— creer esto; no nos ayuda a seguir adelante; por lo tanto, lo pasamos por alto.

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.

But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He's looking away so that you can't catch his eye; he's also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself.

I'd read somewhere that if you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.

Et combien faut-il de ces petites garces pour faire 2,5kg à votre avis? Je vais vous le dire : il en faut 300, c'est-à-dire, une fois coupées, 600 morceaux baignant dans leur jus, des pépins à ôter 600 fois à la pointe du couteau, avec l'inquiétude d'en oublier.

Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's out of step.

Cheer up! Death is round the corner.

the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

Love's elastic. It's not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn't take away. So there's no need to worry about that.

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.

Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable

He was too clever. If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.

One of my sons writes books I can read, but cannot understand, and the other writes books I can understand, but cannot read.