Quotes from Julian Barnes

I hate the stuff. Just a glass of sweet sherry at Christmas, so as not to be accused of being a spoilsport. But it changes people. And not for the better." I agree. I have no interest in alcohol, or in people getting "merry," or "whistled," or "half seas over" and all the other words and phrases which make them feel better about themselves.

But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

But I was wrong about most things, then as now.

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn't, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby.

I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality?

Pierdes el mundo por una mirada? Pues claro que sí. Para eso es el mundo: para perderlo en las circunstancias apropiadas.

Many artists live with the shadow version of themselves. Unawareness of how things might have been if they have done this and not that. If life had made this choice for them rather than that. The road not taken remains at the back of the mind. For some their shadow exists as an external presence, for others an inner haunting.

This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

I stuck out a hand and tried to make up for lost ground. 'What did you say her name was, this chippy of yours?' I asked; but somehow it didn't come out as witty and ironic; just gawky and ill-bred.

All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos.

I considered ducking the appointment, but eventually decided to let the heart speak, and rolled up. I had, after all, spent three days wondering what it would be like to be married to her. In fact, I'd thought about Annick so much that I couldn't remember what she looked like. It was like putting layer after layer of papier mâché over an object and gradually seeing the original shape disappear. How terrible if I failed to recognise the woman I'd already been married to for three days.

It's generally true that success, however defined, drives artistic friends apart more than failure does.

We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals.

Mes baig?me mokykl?, pasižad?jome draugauti vis? gyvenim? ir nu?jome skirtingais keliais

I as supply teaching in Wandsworth at the time: twenty-five quid a week for the privilege of having your bicycle tyres let down each week by different kids at different schools, and of being asked by muscled fifteen-year-olds if you were queer.

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

While Nigel chattered away about the ghoulish features of dying which interested him, I grew melancholy at the half-finished things which a death persuades you to focus on.

When all else failed, when there seemed to be nothing but nonsense in the world, he held to this: that good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. You could play Bach's preludes and fugues at any tempo, with any dynamics, and they would still be great music, proof even against the wretch who brought ten thumbs to the keyboard. And in the same way, you could not play such music cynically.

Ich glaube nicht, dass ich sie je wiedersehen werde. Ich werde sie nie wieder sehen, hören, berühren, in den Armen halten, ihr zuhören, mit ihr lachen; nie wieder auf ihre Schritte horchen, lächeln, wenn eine Tür aufgeht; nie wieder ihren Körper an meinen, meinen an ihren drücken. Ich glaube auch nicht, dass wir uns in entmaterialisierter Form wiedertreffen. Ich glaube, tot ist tot.

You don't paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.

The French had the more pragmatic approach: you married for social position, for money or property, for the perpetuation of family, but not for love. Love rarely survived marriage, and it was a foolish hypocrisy to pretend that it might.

I don't know what the average allotment of good luck in a life is or should be — it's an unanswerable question, and doubtless there is no 'should' in it anyway — but I do know that she was part of my good luck.

that there were some women who aren't at all mysterious, but are only made so by men's inability to understand them.