Julian Barnes quotes - page 4

Memory is identity.... 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. (Julian Barnes)
What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible. View quote
Julian Barnes
All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things. View quote
Julian Barnes
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. View quote
Julian Barnes
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. View quote
Julian Barnes
You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn't matter. The world has been changed nonetheless. View quote
Julian Barnes
There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. View quote
Julian Barnes
It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. View quote
Julian Barnes
The land of embarrassment and breakfast. View quote
Julian Barnes
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it. View quote
Julian Barnes
I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. (Julian Barnes)
It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan. View quote
Julian Barnes
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. View quote
Julian Barnes
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches. View quote
Julian Barnes
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. View quote
Julian Barnes
There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were. View quote
Julian Barnes
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock. View quote
Julian Barnes
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind. View quote
Julian Barnes
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety. View quote
Julian Barnes
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art. View quote
Julian Barnes
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people. (Julian Barnes)
I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books. View quote
Julian Barnes
Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love. View quote
Julian Barnes
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why. View quote
Julian Barnes
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones? View quote
Julian Barnes