Barry Unsworth

“A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if…

— Barry Unsworth

“I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had…

— Barry Unsworth

“Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer. Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days. In Short,…

— Barry Unsworth

“Grief works its own perversions and betrayals; the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal…

— Barry Unsworth

“It is everyone's bounden duty to try to get more than they have got already. If you have got two shillin' you…

— Barry Unsworth

“Wickedness is too common in the world for us to think much of why and wherefore. It is more natural to ask…

— Barry Unsworth

“And this was history now: heroic protest, concerted rebellion, execution of the tyrant, a new social order. It ran like a clear…

— Barry Unsworth

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep…

— Barry Unsworth

“Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it.”

— Barry Unsworth

“The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.”

— Barry Unsworth

“When you in de right you heart strong you no 'fraid nottin'.”

— Barry Unsworth

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey.…

— Barry Unsworth

“Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Justice is a mighty fine thing.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Doubt is the ally of hope, not its enemy, and together they made all the blessing he had.”

— Barry Unsworth

As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without…

— Barry Unsworth

“This praise, though far from fulsome, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some…

— Barry Unsworth

“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”

— Barry Unsworth

“I was born for better things.”

— Barry Unsworth

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us…

— Barry Unsworth

“Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds…

— Barry Unsworth

I'm unemployable in any other capacity.

— Barry Unsworth

“The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now…

— Barry Unsworth

“The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need,destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the…

— Barry Unsworth