Quotes by : Julian Barnes

Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing....

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying....

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you....

Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break....

Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So....

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you;....

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out....

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain....

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander.....