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"Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something."
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"88% of what we call good songs aren't really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had."
"A tapping foot isn't the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think."
"Both parents were very encouraging - especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
"WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."
"I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."
"Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be."
"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."
"I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into."
"When 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."
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