Quotes from Julian Barnes

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.

But that's one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

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?

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

Every love story is a potential grief story.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

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

No reason at all why one should go on writing just for the sake of it. I think it is very important to stop when you haven't got anything to say.

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.

Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d'etre of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

A pier is a disappointed bridge.