Quotes from Julian Barnes

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.

If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.