Quotes by Julian Barnes

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

... fortys nothing, at fifty youre in your prime, sixtys the new forty, and so on.

I dont ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you dont have the power, alas.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldnt be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but thats something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that were just stuck with what weve got. Were on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldnt it? And also if this isnt too grand a word--our tragedy.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention womens eyes: theres so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

When were young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we werent that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. Ive never much minded this myself.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

You may say, But wasnt this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.

WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Life always refused simplicity.

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didnt look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser.