Quotes by Julian Barnes

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.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetimes internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

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

But life never lets you go, does it? You cant put down life the way you put down a book.

You cant love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You cant be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but thats not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

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?

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.’‘So it’s just like the first time round? You always die in the end?’‘Yes, except don’t forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they’ve had enough, not before. The second time round it’s altogether more satisfying because it’s willed.’ She paused, then added, ‘As I say, we cater for what people want.’I hadn’t been blaming her. I’m not that sort. I just wanted to find out how the system worked. ‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?’‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.

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 dont have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

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

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. 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.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.

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