Quotes by Julian Barnes

“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”

“Remember the botched brothel-visit in LEducation sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, l...”

“Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.”

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our li...”

“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. Books make sense of l...”

“Pride makes us long for a solution to things a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.”

“One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears b...”

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.”

“Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evol...”

“Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.”

“Music good music, great music had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses ears acc...”

“Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.”

“Is despair wrong? Isnt it the natural condition of life after a certain age? After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric,...”

“It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that [it's] delight in, and play w...”

“You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.”

“He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite....”

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers an...”

“Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ”

“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”

“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.”