Quotes by Julian Barnes

“you find yourself repeating, They grow up so quickly, dont they? when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.”

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once be...”

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.”

“What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?”

“You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the questi...”

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us times malleability.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”

“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 or defeated.”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionall...”

“I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. Thats in historyHenry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the convers...”

“If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happ...”

“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it careless...”

“If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties...”

“What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is ...”

“Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you arent treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, see...”

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”

“I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time...”

“We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? An...”

“He didnt really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.”