707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it - and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever.

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.

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

The writer's life is full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiac they slipped down the historical throat without touching the sides

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

The secret of happiness is to be happy already

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?