Quotes from Julian Barnes

Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where—and who—you were. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: 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.

Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story?

For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out—perhaps especially when it doesn't work out—promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there's nothing like it, is there? Agreed?

Wilde also established another prime rule of fame in the modern age: that there is no such thing as bad publicity, there is only publicity. Success is better measured in column inches than by what those columns contain.

They say things are determined by genetics, by parenting, by heredity, by climate, by diet, by geography, by time spent in the womb, by nature, by nurture. They fail to hear the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history.

Sad sex is when you feel you're losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is the way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.

melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance)

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years.

Know thy enemy… even thy dead enemy, for he may easily resuscitate.

La principal característica del remordimiento es que no tiene remedio: que ha pasado el tiempo de las disculpas o enmiendas

La vida no es sólo una suma y una resta. Es también la acumulación, la multiplicación de pérdidas, de fracasos.

When I felt myself escaping from the earth," he commented, "my reaction was not pleasure but happiness." It was "a moral feeling," he added. "I could hear myself living, so to speak.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as petite and unopinionated. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes short and bossy.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died.

for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as.

And secondly, reducing the diversity between people didn't result in harmony within. The narcissism of small differences ensured this.

Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.

You realize that you want official interference into other people's lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.

mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.

You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn't have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.

Have you anything to declare? Yes, I'd like to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a childish delight in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any duty to pay on any of these? There ought to be.

the reward of merit is not life's business.