Flaubert's Parrot

by Julian Barnes

Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much.

Books are not life, however much we might prefer it if they were.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously.

‘It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.’

The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.