707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.

And that was all the part of it – the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it – in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.

In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another.

The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Every day is Sunday” – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is “success” in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?