Quotes from Julian Barnes

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

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.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

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

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves