Julian Barnes Quotes
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Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
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The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.
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And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.
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I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it
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Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
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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.
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we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death
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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.
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Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
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What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?
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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.
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Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
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You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
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...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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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.
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I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.
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In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
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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.
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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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.
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He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.
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We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
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