707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.

Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.

They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

No sooner do we come into this world, than bits of us start to fall off.

At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, “There’s someone missing.” That felt correct, in both senses.

I love you.’ For a start, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn’t leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we’ll use them without thought; we won’t be able to resist. Oh, we say we won’t, but we will. We’ll get drunk, or lonely, or – likeliest of all – plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied.

Old love is a row of beach huts in November.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book – though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.