Julian Barnes

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life …"

"You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vagu…"

"Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life…"

"I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife ."

"This is I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason."