Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery ...
JULIAN BARNES To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though...
JULIAN BARNES And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
JULIAN BARNES Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
JULIAN BARNES The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly.
JULIAN BARNES Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that
JULIAN BARNES Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex
JULIAN BARNES To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic s...
JULIAN BARNES Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we a...
JULIAN BARNES Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees ...
JULIAN BARNES Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obedi...
JULIAN BARNES It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice wha...
JULIAN BARNES What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
JULIAN BARNES How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the l...
JULIAN BARNES You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshe...
JULIAN BARNES You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm af...
JULIAN BARNES The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, vicious...
JULIAN BARNES Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subt...
JULIAN BARNES When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
JULIAN BARNES Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards i...
JULIAN BARNES Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, th...
JULIAN BARNES The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
JULIAN BARNES The writer's life is full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet th...
JULIAN BARNES You grew old first not in your own eyes,but in other people's eyes;slowly,you agreed with their opin...
JULIAN BARNES Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to yo...
JULIAN BARNES The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly
JULIAN BARNES Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
JULIAN BARNES When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in ...
JULIAN BARNES The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
JULIAN BARNES What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possibl...
JULIAN BARNES Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But ...
JULIAN BARNES Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not par...
JULIAN BARNES Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the bette...
JULIAN BARNES That form is very freeing, ... It's a great relief for the novelist not to have to be there in the w...
JULIAN BARNES The Sixties were an oyster decade: slippery, luxurious and reportedly aphrodisiac they slipped down ...
JULIAN BARNES People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these bein...
JULIAN BARNES I think he had a quite sort of ambiguous relationship to Holmes. It made him rich, it made him famou...
JULIAN BARNES The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature; only then can he see clearly
JULIAN BARNES I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes bey...
JULIAN BARNES History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequac...
JULIAN BARNES It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we i...
JULIAN BARNES The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and ...
JULIAN BARNES History: the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated.
JULIAN BARNES Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
JULIAN BARNES I don't regard it as a historical novel, I regard it as a novel of now, which just happens to be set...
JULIAN BARNES In soccer, the form of the encoded adjective is well-developed.
JULIAN BARNES As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front ...
JULIAN BARNES He left no trace apart from the local papers and Doyle's own account of the case. He really had to b...
JULIAN BARNES I was also interested in the racial side of it. Even today, the Chief of the London Metropolitan Pol...
JULIAN BARNES I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left...
JULIAN BARNES Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influ...
JULIAN BARNES Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.
JULIAN BARNES Ах, век мифов и легенд. Шарлемань, рыцарство, горный Пир...
JULIAN BARNES Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out...
JULIAN BARNES (on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come ...
JULIAN BARNES Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to yo...
JULIAN BARNES I just read the new novel by Jay McInerney, who is a friend of mine. And I did so with great apprehe...
JULIAN BARNES I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle...
JULIAN BARNES When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell...
JULIAN BARNES Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Ale...
JULIAN BARNES When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it ea...
JULIAN BARNES What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curios...
JULIAN BARNES His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented real...
JULIAN BARNES If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as ...
JULIAN BARNES Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.
JULIAN BARNES The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
JULIAN BARNES WHORES.
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no o...
JULIAN BARNES It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to ...
JULIAN BARNES [Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the ill...
JULIAN BARNES Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say ...
JULIAN BARNES Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and...
JULIAN BARNES Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
JULIAN BARNES He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, bu...
JULIAN BARNES Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number o...
JULIAN BARNES When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you...
JULIAN BARNES A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other s...
JULIAN BARNES The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
JULIAN BARNES He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They...
JULIAN BARNES Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to yo...
JULIAN BARNES What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more...
JULIAN BARNES Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, a...
JULIAN BARNES We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But...
JULIAN BARNES I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the i...
JULIAN BARNES Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she'd had enough of in her time: usu...
JULIAN BARNES Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
JULIAN BARNES The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only pa...
JULIAN BARNES Every love story is a potential grief story.
JULIAN BARNES If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seven...
JULIAN BARNES Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that's what the feeling does to you. Imagine...
JULIAN BARNES In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then th...
JULIAN BARNES And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both:...
JULIAN BARNES But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I c...
JULIAN BARNES This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parent...
JULIAN BARNES Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
JULIAN BARNES Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might ...
JULIAN BARNES We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible ...
JULIAN BARNES What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let li...
JULIAN BARNES The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practi...
JULIAN BARNES I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
JULIAN BARNES That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus obje...
JULIAN BARNES I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
JULIAN BARNES History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's ...
JULIAN BARNES I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventur...
JULIAN BARNES Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of ...
JULIAN BARNES Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by...
JULIAN BARNES Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
JULIAN BARNES We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not...
JULIAN BARNES I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of ...
JULIAN BARNES This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.
JULIAN BARNES History is:

+ the lies of the victors

+ the self-delusions of the defea...
BARNES JULIAN Когда я был моложе, я получал то, что мне было положено. ...
JULIAN BARNES Может это предзнаменование? Кто знает? В le bon vieux temps , ко�...
JULIAN BARNES He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagi...
JULIAN BARNES Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would b...
JULIAN BARNES The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail the...
JULIAN BARNES He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insu...
JULIAN BARNES Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making y...
JULIAN BARNES Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and d...
JULIAN BARNES You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first ...
JULIAN BARNES Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinat...
JULIAN BARNES One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orping...
JULIAN BARNES Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why shoul...
JULIAN BARNES He came attached to the case. ... I didn't know much about his biography before I started, and I had...
JULIAN BARNES A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die...
BARNABE BARNES Ah, sweet Content, where doth thine harbour hold.
BARNABE BARNES We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankfu...
ALBERT BARNES Praise now is one of the great duties of the redeemed. It will be their employment for ever.
ALBERT BARNES The Psalms are selected by the Christian from the whole Bible, as they were by the Jew from the book...
ALBERT BARNES The Bible, as a revelation from God, was not designed to give us all the information we might desire...
ALBERT BARNES It does not require great learning to be a Christian and be convinced of the truth of the Bible. It ...
ALBERT BARNES A 'disorderly walk' denotes conduct that is in any way contrary to the rules of Christ. The word wou...
ALBERT BARNES Whatever be the topic of conversation, the spirit of piety should be diffused through it - as the sa...
ALBERT BARNES Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter b...
DJUNA BARNES We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the...
DJUNA BARNES Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thu...
DJUNA BARNES The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the...
DJUNA BARNES The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
DJUNA BARNES Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.
DJUNA BARNES Ah, sweet Content, where doth thine harbour hold?
BARNABE BARNES One of the few things in dance to match the Royal Ballet's curtain calls is the Royal Ballet's danci...
CLIVE BARNES An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
DJUNA BARNES A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
DJUNA BARNES Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and enti...
CLIVE BARNES We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
DJUNA BARNES A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
DJUNA BARNES We are all one - or at least we should be - and it is our job, our duty, and our great challenge to ...
ROY BARNES I went to a very academically competitive high school. So I was always quite studious and quiet, jus...
BEN BARNES The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
DJUNA BARNES We live in a youth-obsessed, aesthetically obsessed culture. That is no more evident than in the fil...
BEN BARNES Business and the state have a common interest; not an adversarial interest.
ROY BARNES When I was at school, I was in choirs more than anything else, from a very young age, about 9 years ...
BEN BARNES True beauty radiates not from outer cosmetics, but from the simple joy of making a difference for th...
DEBORAH BARNES I think every film actor secretly wants to be a rock star as well; just that part of the job which r...
BEN BARNES Presidents with strong nerves are decisive. They don't balk at unpopular decisions. They are wil...
FRED BARNES You still get these waves of doubt that come over you, for example, when you get a bad review or you...
BEN BARNES The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
DJUNA BARNES In my first year as governor, we solved some of the problems that had begun to undermine the Open Re...
ROY BARNES It's level with the ground. It has to be granite and it must be of 24 inches by 12 inches and it mus...
BRUCE BARNES We didn't make our free throws. It's pretty simple. We didn't convert at the free-throw line - that'...
BRUCE BARNES I don't have the answer. I wish I did, because I would have used it. He's a good coach and has them ...
BRUCE BARNES It was a pretty typical Carson-Douglas match. It doesn't matter who's the better team, it always com...
BRUCE BARNES This is football country. The only reason your parents had you was so you could play football.
BRUCE BARNES I had some anxious moments as the ball rolled on the rim for a second.
BRUCE BARNES That was a great read by Adam. He made the right decision and found Zach at just the right time. I f...
BRUCE BARNES We ran our spread offense to Adam. He can do what he wants with the ball. We had Zach (Weismann) and...
BRUCE BARNES This is big for our kids' confidence. This rivalry is important to our kids. A lot of the kids on bo...
BRUCE BARNES They're all big (games remaining). They're all league games. We're on the road again. We have to bou...
BRUCE BARNES As the leaders and decision-makers of this great state, it is our responsibility to strive for perfe...
ROY BARNES There are certain things we have to do, so we have to be ready to pay for it. We can't send a whole ...
BRIAN BARNES In one season, the number of cartons rejected for export because of fruit fly damage has halved from...
BRIAN BARNES If I were a drug trafficker, I'd choose this place.
BRIAN BARNES We don't believe making replicas is the same as repairing the structures.
BRIAN BARNES Some time ago, we had shown schematically where we could put a wall,
BRIAN BARNES The biggest thing for us, like always, will be blocking up front, ... We've changed a few things and...
BRIAN BARNES This almost starts a new season, ... We've had our preseason and now we're going to the real season....
BRIAN BARNES Somebody has got to win,
BRIAN BARNES Amatus waited a long time, but at last he broke the silence.
"There is much I don't understand....
JOHN BARNES ... once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teach...
JOHN BARNES We have been doing golf packaging for about 15 years. It's taken awhile to cultivate our business, b...
BOB BARNES As we move forward with this technology, we should expect to see costs go down and roller capabiliti...
BOB BARNES I knew instantly he was the right choice.
BOB BARNES We are excited to be in the Austin market. We think this is a healthy long-term addition for our ban...
BOB BARNES The 4A side has a lot of parity. The backdoor guys will mean everything. That's where the tournament...
BRENT BARNES Almost every year, it's what happens in the consolations that determines the eventual team champion....
BRENT BARNES We didn't wrestle as well as we could have. But this is a good tournament, good competition.
BRENT BARNES If we're going to make a run at Battle Ground, we're going to need all our guys stepping up Saturday...
BRENT BARNES We had a good run in the second quarter, but they got a breakaway at the buzzer.
BILLY BARNES We were OK once we started getting the ball inside.
BILLY BARNES It gives them more incentive to come up here and drive legally without being a citizen.
BILLY BARNES Consistency and quality of coaching has been a big part of our success.
BILLY BARNES I don't know if you've noticed it. But Duchamp was magnificent.
ROBERT BARNES Television is the first truly democratic culture, the first culture available to everybody and enti...
CLIVE BARNES The mainstream media may have trouble resisting the temptation to declare that Karl Rove has been de...
FRED BARNES What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
DJUNA BARNES There's a little truth in all jive, and a little jive in all truth.
LEONARD BARNES I LIKE ads. It's not that we don't like ads, we just don't like ads when they are out of place.
BILL BARNES And while the wicket falls behind Her steps, I thought if I could find A wife I need not blush...
WILLIAM BARNES Now voe me I can zing on my business abrode: Though the storm do beat down on my poll, There's...
WILLIAM BARNES Georgia is in an enviable position today, but we can't rest on our laurels.
ROY BARNES Can I ask you something personal?”

Six inches but I tell everyone eight.
JOHN BARNES