707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.

Gradually, he didn’t doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment.

I’m a novelist, so I can’t write about ideas unless they’re attached to people.

Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.

That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

When you are in your twenties, if even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren’t. They weren’t even one of the questions.

I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history – Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.