Julian Barnes quotes:

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.

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

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 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.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

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.

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.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

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

Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.

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.

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

Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and thats gone, thats true. But I dont think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

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

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

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

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

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

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as petite and unopinionated. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes short and bossy.

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. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later [...]. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it?

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense."

I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness."

And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you'd do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It's just as eloquent as speech."

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself."

The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?"

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

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

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

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...

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.

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

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.

Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.

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 carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

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--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

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; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

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 evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors," I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

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 is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

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.

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

A pier is a disappointed bridge.

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

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.

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.

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

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?

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

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

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

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

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.

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

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.

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

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

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 exaggerated form of pleasure.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

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? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

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

We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

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

We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

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

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 of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

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

The more you learn, the less you fear.

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?