Quotes by Julian Barnes

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

“I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down...”

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

“If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably i...”

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual poi...”

“Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an...”

“Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. Th...”

“Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.”

“After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human...”

“wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.”

“Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget y...”

“Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.”

“But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.”

“And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old...”

“In life, every ending is just the start of another story.”

“Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.”

“There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.”

“When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way ...”

“I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.”

“Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.”