Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
Julian BarnesI had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
Julian BarnesWHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian BarnesWhen we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
Julian BarnesYou can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.
Julian Barnes