Top Julian Barnes Quotes

You see—I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters.

Later—well, what came later, came later.

Sit yourself down, Joan instructed as we reached the the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room.

So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to...

Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.

From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only...

Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the s...

No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.

Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are.

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cli...

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives d...

He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn't just...

Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.

You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and tru...

I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn'...

You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while...

And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling . . . even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was...

I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian's unfinished sentence: 'So, for instance, if Tony . . .' I knew I couldn't change, or mend, anything now.

We're leaving, I told her one July afternoon.We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.