Cross Channel Quotes

“Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another”
― Julian Barnes, Cross Channel

“Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.”
― Julian Barnes, Cross Channel

“He was fond of quoting his wife's formulation, arrived at long ago when they had both been middle-aged: 'As we get older, we become hardened in our least acceptable characteristics.' That was true; though even knowing it, how could we be saved from it? Our least acceptable characteristics were those most apparent to others, not to ourselves. And what were his? One of them was complacently asking himself unanswerable questions.”
― Julian Barnes, Cross Channel

“I once did an interview for French radio in a Paris hotel room. There was a sound-check, the recordist pressed the switch and, as the spools began to circle, the interviewer shaved my chin with the microphone. ‘Monsieur Clements,’ he asked, with a kind of intimate authority, ‘'le mythe et la réalité?’ I stared at him for quite some time, feeling my French evaporate and brain dry. Eventually, I gave him the only answer I could: that such questions and their appropriate responses no doubt came naturally to French intellectuals, but that since I was a mere pragmatic English novelist, he would get a better interview out of me if he perhaps approached such larger matters by way of smaller, lighter ones. This would also, I explained, help warm up my French for me. He smiled in concord, the engineer wound back the tape and the microphone was placed again like a tear-glass to catch my drops of wisdom. ‘Monsieur Clements, we are sitting here in your hotel room in Paris one afternoon in April. The window is open, and outside is unrolling the daily life of the city. Opposite the window is a wardrobe mirror and in it I can almost see reflected the daily life of Paris which is unrolling outside the window. Monsieur Clements, le mythe et la réalité?”
― Julian Barnes, Cross Channel

“I blush at the memory of my first letters—& would have them back if there were a manner for effecting this—they were the letters of a young cub, & a spoiled one who missed his cousin & judged difference mere peculiarity—yet I still believe that the stinking macquerel & the sallad made of stinking oil & the omelet made of stinking eggs that we were obliged by hunger to devour in Saint Omer were all truthfully described.”
― Julian Barnes, Cross Channel