Quotes from Julian Barnes

The truth is not kind.

I was determined to be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie.

Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown.

religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.

There is a strong tradition in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth of artists seeing marriage as the enemy of art. Love, yes; marriage, no. Flaubert took the wedding of any literary friend as a personal betrayal, and beyond that, a betrayal of their shared art.

People say of death, 'There's nothing to be frightened of'. They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There's NOTHING to be frightened of'. Jules Renard: 'The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word nothing'.

And as for her more general advice, let's say that one advantage of being an ex-husband is that you no longer need to justify your behaviour. Or follow suggestions.

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - than love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Why did people imagine that progress consisted of believing in less, rather than believing in more, in opening yourself to more of the universe?

We believe too little, and aesthetically know too much; so we re-create, we find new categories of pleasure in the work.

characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends.

I tried to explain about refusing an unsought gift, about action versus passivity.

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?

People say of death, 'There's nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There's NOTHING to be frightened of.' Jules Renard: "The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word nothing'.

The more you learn, the less you fear.

Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms (...)

Billiards doesn't have to end. A game of billiards could last for ever, even if you were losing all the time. I don't like things to end.

Why should a word in a recipe be less important than a word in a novel? One can lead to physical indigestion, the other to mental. I

And in your opinion, the notion that everything works out in the end, and the counter-notion that nothing ever does, are both equally banal.

And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden.

Bet kai esi labai protingas, tai, manau, kas nors gali išmušti tave iš v?ži?, jeigu nepasisaugosi

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.