Top Julian Barnes Quotes

It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feeli...

If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if To...

But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens—of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass—this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it.

When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.

Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.

Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's...

That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.

Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .

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

Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Som...

And one other thing: don't ask me about the weather. I don't much remember what the weather has been like during my life. True, I can remember how hot sun gave greater impetus to sex; how sudden snow...

The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it a...

Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such bana...

But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.

He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.