Quotes by : Julian Barnes

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

Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or....

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your....

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain....

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then....

You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid,....

I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.....

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony....

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.