Barry Unsworth

“But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all.”

— Barry Unsworth

“The odds against this were tremendous, but Edith was not interested in the odds; people who thought about odds were unheroic and…

— Barry Unsworth

“At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild…

— Barry Unsworth

“Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have…

— Barry Unsworth

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

— Barry Unsworth

“A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself he may think himself as other than he truly is and…

— Barry Unsworth

Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes…

— Barry Unsworth

“It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory.”

— Barry Unsworth

“But what a man sees still must depend on what he looks for. While I have eyes of my own, I shall…

— Barry Unsworth

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

— Barry Unsworth

“Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.”

— Barry Unsworth

“The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...”

— Barry Unsworth

“Only way to live here is day by day, same as anywhere.”

— Barry Unsworth

I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.

— Barry Unsworth

“The heart is a vital organ, but it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons,…

— Barry Unsworth

“No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.”

— Barry Unsworth

“I knew little of the world, as the Justice had seen, but I knew that we can lose ourselves in the parts…

— Barry Unsworth

We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying…

— Barry Unsworth

“A man can live free and not seek to limit the freedom of others so long as no one seeks to limit…

— Barry Unsworth

“The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the…

— Barry Unsworth

“Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice,…

— Barry Unsworth

But whatever the ramifications, whatever turns the path takes, the beginning is always there, in a particular moment, a particular point of…

— Barry Unsworth

“Money is sacred as everyone knows... So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it.…

— Barry Unsworth

“There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.”

— Barry Unsworth

“Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In…

— Barry Unsworth