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And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

Julian Barnes

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Julian Barnes
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 19
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
Writer
Leicester
England
J. Barnes
J Barnes
Edward Pygge
Julian Patrick Barnes
Time
Smallest
Takes
Teach
Pleasure
Pain

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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
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People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
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He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
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Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
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We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
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If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
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In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
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Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
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The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
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All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.
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He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
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[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
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