707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.

Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were.

Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination – the prompter’s voice at his ear – which had added the words “for ever.” He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.

Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.

You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.