Quotes from Julian Barnes

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got.

Later—well, what came later, came later.

I survived. "He survived to tell the tale"—that's what people say, don't they? History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

Daha önce bir araya getirilmemiÅŸ iki kiÅŸiyi bir araya getirebilirsiniz. Bu bazen ateÅŸle çal??an bir balona, hidrojenle çal??an bir balonu baÄŸlaman?n ÅŸu ilk denemesinde olduÄŸu gibi bir ÅŸeydir; yere çak?l?p yanmay? m? yeÄŸlersiniz yoksa yan?p yere çak?lmay? m?? Ama bazen de deneme baÅŸar?l?r ve yeni bir ÅŸey yarat?l?r dünya deÄŸiÅŸir.

I don't believe in God, but I miss him.

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

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

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.