If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be colored by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

— Julian Barnes

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever coloring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Furthermore, her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Furthermore, her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

— Julian Barnes

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

— Julian Barnes

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

— Julian Barnes

If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

— Julian Barnes

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.

— Julian Barnes

... I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

— Julian Barnes

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

— Julian Barnes