When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“In a novel, all his life's anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria - all would have been… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Try as I could -which wasn't very hard- I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“He died a modern death, in hospital,........after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it… — julian barnes Copy Share Image
“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves.… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
