Julian BarnesThinkers

Art is not something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence.

Britain is the land of embarrassment and breakfast.

History is not self-repeating, it just burps, and we taste again the raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Irony is what people miss.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

Seasonality is a thing one approaches differently as one grows older. Youth prefer the vulgar months but as you grow older you learn to like the months that can't make up their minds, the months that admit that things can't ever bear the same certainty again.

The Writer is only able to see clearly when he is universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature.