Julian Barnes

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.