After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant.

— Julian Barnes

Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends.

— Julian Barnes

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.

— Julian Barnes

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred percent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.’‘So it’s just like the first time round? You always die in the end?’‘Yes, except don’t forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they’ve had enough, not before. The second time round it’s altogether more satisfying because it’s willed.’ She paused, then added, ‘As I say, we cater for what people want.’ I hadn’t been blaming her. I’m not that sort. Furthermore, I just wanted to find out how the system worked. ‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, a hundred years, a thousand years?’‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heavens around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.

— Julian Barnes

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

— Julian Barnes

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

— Julian Barnes

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who Seymour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history; heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. Furthermore, he wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.

— Julian Barnes

Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciant called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.

— Julian Barnes

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

— Julian Barnes

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.

— Julian Barnes